
od3/£^d5 







GfKiGGS 



Odds and Ends 

FROM 

Pagoda Land 



By 

William C. Griggs, M. D. 

Author of 

Shan Folk-Lore Stories from the Hill 
and Water Country 



Philadelphia 

2lmctican JSaptidt publication Societis 

1906 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

• Two Copies Received 

1 NOV 24 1906 

OIASSOA XX5.,N0. I 
COPY B. 



Copyright 1906 by the 
American Baptist Publication Society 

Published October, 1906 



Ifrom tbe Society's own press 



Introduction 

The man who attempts to study the 
Oriental finds himself face to face with a 
very difficult, albeit a very interesting prob- 
lem. The OrientaPs idea and ideals ; his 
ways of looking at men and things and his 
valuation of them are so different from those 
of his Western brother, that the latter often- 
times finds it impossible to understand him. 
As Kipling has truly said, ** For East is East 
and West is West, and never the twain shall 
meet." In fact, I have sometimes thought 
that the longer one lives in the East the less 
confidence has he that he understands his 
dark-skinned neighbors. 

It is for this reason that I have refrained 
in this little volume from considering ab- 
stract questions, which I leave to the savant ; 
besides, the busy medical missionary has 
little time to spend in such study. Instead 
I have tried to show what the common, 
everyday life of the native of Burma is, so 
far as I have been able to judge it after a 
twelve-year residence in his country. For 
iii 



UntroDuctton 

some years I have been in the habit of 
jotting down any interesting or humorous 
incident it has been my fortune to meet, 
and this little book is the result. "Odds 
and Ends " it is true, but I hope they will 
prove both interesting and instructive, and 
give a faint idea of the Burman, the Shan, 
and the beautiful country they live in. 

Philadelphia, 1906. ^^ Q^ Q^ 



IV 



Content0 



PAGE 

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PEOPLE .... 7 

II 
EVERYDAY SIGHTS AND SOUNDS .... 61 

III 
ODDS AND ENDS OF TRAVEL 103 

IV 
A FEW MISTAKES 157 

V 

MEDICAL MISSIONARY WORK 173 

VI 

" NATS," " HPEAS," AND CHARMS . . . 2II 

VII 
THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE 251 

GLOSSARY • • • • 275 

V 



Cbaracterietice of tbe people 



OMEBODY has said that if one 
wishes to see the city in which the 
greatest number of different nation- 
alities dwell together in peace he must go 
to Singapore. I think, however, that he is 
wrong, and that there are more different 
kinds of people living in the large cities of 
Burma, especially in Upper Burma, than in 
Singapore. 

First and foremost, of course, comes the 
Burman, for years the conquering race, and 
now, although conquered by the superiority 
of British arms and valor, still proud of his 
history. He looks upon his neighbors, the 
Shans, Kachins, and natives of India, as 
men of inferior races, and only bows before 
the all-conquering Anglo-Saxon because he 
has to. 

The Burman makes his home on the rich 
plains, close beside the rivers, for he is a 
great waterman, while the Karen, the 
Kachin, the Chin, and other races live upon 
the hills, and the Shan, the tribe most nearly 
related to the Burman, builds his villages in 
9 



©D&6 anO iBnDs trom iPagoDa XanD 

the valleys between the mountains in what 
he picturesquely calls the " hill and water 
country." 

Lured by high wages and plenty of work, 
multitudes of natives of India have crossed 
the Bay of Bengal and landed in Burma, 
which has been overspread by them like 
locusts on a field. In the cities one meets 
with them in crowds, huddled together, 
usually in the poorest quarters of the town, 
the ** ghettos '* of Burma, in fact. Along 
the railroads, upon steamships, and at any 
place where coolie work is to be had, the 
native of India is very much in evidence. 
Then too, the Chinaman has poured in from 
the north, till the Burman, good-natured, 
easy-going, and improvident, runs the risk 
of being crushed between the upper and 
nether millstones. The native of India, the 
kallah as the Burman calls him, does 
not care anything for the country. All he 
wants is to make money, which he hopes 
to take to his home and live upon in com- 
fort during the rest of his days. To do this 
he is willing to live in a shack or a hovel; 
eat but just enough to keep soul and body 
together ; will beg in the most unblushing 
manner, and never give out a single copper 
piece more than he is obliged to. It is im- 

lO 



Cbaractecistics ot tbc ipcople 

possible to imagine a greater contrast than 
that existing between the low-caste native 
of India and the Burman in whose land he 
has made his temporary home. 

The Burman is a cheerful, careless fellow, 
who follows at least one Christian precept, 
for he ** takes no thought for the morrow," 
and is content if he has sufficient to last 
through the day in hand. His habit has 
grown to a great extent, I think, from the 
ease with which he can make a living. The 
country is so fertile that he has merely to 
scratch the ground to get a harvest ; his 
wants are few, and he prefers to live from 
hand to mouth in an easy, slipshod way, 
than to heap up treasures and know not 
who shall enjoy them. He spends as he 
gets and depends upon his children to sup- 
port him during his old age. ** Why should 
I work any harder,'* he asks, ** when I 
have enough to eat and to wear and a 
family to look after me when I am old ? " 
Well, why should he ? 

He is very tolerant of others' religious 
beliefs and does not bother himself with 
what they believe in or worship. In this 
he again differs greatly from his neighbors 
across the seas, the intolerant followers of 
the prophet, who would to-day, if they 
II 



©DDd anD BnOd trom ipago^a ILanD 

dared, raise the crescent flag and offer the 
Koran or death to their conquered enemies, 
and the Hindu who hates the Mohammedan 
as cordially as the Mohammedan hates him. 

The Burman is well-made physically and, 
although not so tall as some of the natives 
of India who have emigrated into his land, 
is much better built and stronger. He is 
rather dark, with jet black, straight hair ; 
eyes of the same color, and but very little 
hair upon his face. He does not shave 
these few hairs, but pulls them out with a 
pair of tweezers, and it is a common sight 
to see a man with his face screwed up — for 
it must hurt — sitting with a small mirror in 
his left hand and his right armed with the 
tweezers busily engaged in pulling out the 
whiskers from his chin. 

The Burman is nothing if not polite and 
his language allows a great scope in using 
polite phrases. In Shan, for instance, there 
are half a dozen ways of saying " I,*' graded 
according to the rank of the speaker and 
the person spoken to, running all the way 
from a very arrogant ** I " down to **the 
slave of our lord's head." 

A patient coming to the dispensary always 
asks for ** just a little ' ' medicine. A funny 
thing happened awhile ago. A woman 

12 



Cbaracteri0tlc0 ot tbe People 

came from a village quite a long distance 
up the river and she wanted enough medi- 
cine to last for several days. She wished 
to be polite, of course, and it would not be 
polite to say, ** Please give me a lot of 
medicine, as I have come from a distant 
village," so she asked for ''myan myan ga 
/^," literally, ** a great little." Myan me2iX\s 
a large amount, doubling the word intensi- 
fies its meaning, and ga le means a little 
amount. 

Titles are given in great profusion, and 
to call a man your lordship or **our lord " 
is the proper way to address a superior. 
The wife of a man living in a jungle village 
up the river was very sick — dying, they 
feared — and she assuredly would have died 
had I not been able to step in in time to 
save her life. The husband evidently 
wished to give me a unique title when he 
came later on to pay his respects and thank 
me for my ** act of grace and compassion," 
as he termed it. He had called me *'payah " 
(lord) before and that did not satisfy him, 
so now he said, ** You are a Jesus Christ 
payah from heaven." This sounds blas- 
phemous, of course, to Western ears, but 
it was not to him. There is a great dif- 
ference between lord and Lord and be- 
13 



®DD0 anD BnDs ftom iPagoDa XanD 

tween god and God. It goes without say- 
ing that I told him that I could not allow 
him to say such a thing as that and tried 
to make him understand that there is but 
one Lord and God and that all others are 
gods in name only. 

In the "old Burman days," as the time 
before the British occupation is called, this 
custom of giving of titles was carried to a 
great excess, especially when addressing 
the king. I really do not know — I doubt 
whether anybody does — just how many 
titles he had, but some of them were 
strange, even ludicrous. The word ** gold- 
en" was attached to almost everything 
he used. Thus, **to approach the golden 
foot" meant to be honored by receiving 
an audience by the king. In Shan the very 
word king means, **the lord of the golden 
palace.'' 

The insignia of royalty was a white 
umbrella, nobody but the king and the im- 
mediate members of the royal family being 
allowed to carry an umbrella of that color, 
so one of the king's titles was *' Lord of the 
White Umbrella." He reveled in the dis- 
tinction of being "King of Kings, Lord of 
the Universe, Son of the Sun, Lord of the 
Moon and Planets, Owner of Innumerable 
14 



Cbaractecietics of tbe people 

Herds of White Elephants, Beloved of the 
Nats (fairies)," and so forth. 

I think, however, the strangest title was 
given to my pony. The wife of the man 
who looked after it came to me one day and 
told me that *' his lordship " had been given 
so much to eat that he had kicked a hole in 
**his lordship's" door! Even the pony 
became noble by carrying a white man. 

One title among the Shans always strikes 
a new-comer as odd. One of the most 
respectful terms of addressing an elderly 
female is **old woman," so if you were to 
say, ** If this old woman will do so and so I 
shall be much obliged," you would not, as 
at home, have been guilty of offering an 
insult, but, on the contrary, would have 
been most polite. 

Without doubt the most marked charac- 
teristic in the native of Burma, of whatever 
race he may be, is his love of *' following 
custom." The ** customs of the fathers " 
must be followed whether they are good or 
bad. **We have a custom" is a phrase 
heard upon every hand. You ask why is 
this or that done in this or that way, *' It is 
custom," you are told. Everything must 
be done according to custom, and should a 
Westerner, knowing that a certain thing 
15 



Qtf^e anD JBnt>6 ttom iPaaoOa XanD 

could be done better or more easily in 
another way, try to make a native do it 
according to his (the Westerner's) idea, he 
is sure to arouse all the stubbornness which 
lies in an Oriental's make-up, and the grum- 
blings would more than counterbalance the 
benefits. 

I once had occasion, if ever man did, of 
finding out the truth of this. Upon start- 
ing work at Mongnai, in the Southern Shan 
States, in 1891, it was necessary, of course, 
to build a house. We lived several months 
in a zayat or rest-place built in a monastery 
compound, but this was very unpleasant, 
to say the least. But the building of that 
house ! What a weary, weary work it 
was I A person writing home afterward 
said he had never seen such a house in 
America — I should hope not I A Western 
farmer would be ashamed to run up such a 
shack to cover his cows with, he said, and 
while this was quite true, if the gentleman 
had known the amount of brain fag, not to 
mention the strain upon a Christian temper, 
that ramshackle house had cost, he would 
have modified his statements somewhat. 

I found it was customary to plant a post 
in the ground and measure it afterward 
and, if it proved too long, to cut off a part 
16 



Cbaractcriatics ot tbc ipcople 

of it with a mallet and chisel instead of 
sawing it with a saw. I discovered also 
that it was custom to build the roof with 
eaves that would come within a few feet 
of the ground, and when I objected to this 
the head carpenter gravely informed me 
that a house could not be built in any other 
way — the eaves must come down to within 
the proper length. It was custom — that 
settled it — and, besides, whoever heard of 
building a house, except the saubwa^s, in 
any other way > So, while I was away in 
the jungle the large beams which support 
the eaves — I do not know what the tech- 
nical name for them is — were actually cut 
** according to custom '* and nailed in place. 
I was quite nettled when I saw what the 
carpenters had done during my absence, 
but I told them that it simply meant more 
work for them because I had made up my 
mind to have the house built as I wanted 
it, Shan custom or no Shan custom. So 
early next morning I stood by till the head 
carpenter had cut off the end of one of the 
beams to the length I desired ; then, con- 
gratulating myself upon my success, I went 
home to breakfast. But I had not gauged 
the resources of that head carpenter cor- 
rectly, for while I was eating my breakfast 
B 17 



©&D5 anD JBnt>3 from ipagoDa XanD 

he took the piece of wood I had seen cut off 
and nailed it into place again, so that when 
I returned I found the eaves were once 
more ** according to custom." 

The head carpenter saw that I had lost 
all patience and was as mad as the tradi- 
tional wet hen, and so he asked me what 
difference it made how the eaves were 
built. Why did I wish to have them short ? 
I told him that one reason was the low eaves 
would shut out the view of the beautiful 
mountains around us. The man had been 
sitting upon the ground chewing betel-nut, 
evidently congratulating himself upon the 
fact that he had circumvented the new 
teacher, but he was so surprised at my 
reply that he rose to his feet and looked at 
the mountains as earnestly as though he 
had never seen them before in all his life. 
** Beautiful mountains ! " he said. " Beau- 
tiful mountains ! Wants his house built in 
such a strange manner because he wants 
to see the beautiful mountains I" It was 
so funny he laughed and even called his 
fellow-workmen to tell them the joke. Who 
ever heard of beautiful mountains, any- 
way ? The idea was far beyond his com- 
prehension. He could not understand why 
any sane person should wish to look at 
i8 



Cbaractecistics ot tbe IPeople 

common, everyday mountains. He could 
do nothing but laugh. 

He grew grave again, however, when I 
ordered him to cut off that offending beam 
once more, and flatly refused to do so. 
Finally he said he would quit working rather 
than build a house not according to custom. 
He was as good as his word too, for after a 
little further talk he gathered up his tools. 
His fellow-workmen followed his example 
and they all left the compound for their 
homes. 

I was now in a dilemma. If these men 
would rather go on strike than transgress 
the canons of their traditions, I knew no 
other carpenters in the city would take up 
the work. There was but one thing to do, 
and that was to go and see the native 
prince and ask him to order the men back. 
This he did, saying he would punish them if 
they gave me any more trouble. 

Sometimes, however, the saupa^ himself 
cannot compel a person to act contrary to 
custom. A man in Mongnai once called 
me hurriedly to come and see his boy, who 
had wounded himself severely by falling 
upon the point of a knife which he carried 
without any sheath in his bag under his 

1 Sau pa (Shan), sau bwa (Burmese), a native prince. 
19 



®DD0 anO J£\\t>3 from iPagoDa 5LanD 

arm. I then found that numbers of small 
boys in the city carried similar knives in 
their bags, so the next time I visited the 
"palace" I told the prince about it and 
said I thought it would be a good thing if 
he were to issue an order forbidding small 
boys to carry such knives, but although he 
acknowledged that the custom was a bad 
one, yet because it was custom he could 
not change it. *'Our fathers and grand- 
fathers carried such knives when they were 
children," he said, and it was therefore 
custom. There was no getting around that. 

The Shans carry swords with handles 
half as long as the blade. These swords 
prove very useful during journeys in the 
jungle, one of their uses being to chop down 
firewood for making fires at night. The 
handles of these laps, as they are called, 
are usually made of bamboo wound around 
with plaited strands of rattan. They are 
very poor, however, for the blade-shank is 
merely stuck in and so imperfectly fastened 
that a good blow will often make the blade 
and the handle part company. 

A friend of mine once asked a Shan why 

he did not make the handle of his sword 

shorter, and put a button at the end which 

would keep it firm and secure, but the man 

20 



Cbaractetistic0 of tbe People 

shook his head and gave the usual reply 
that it was custom to make them thus. 
** What was good enough for our ancestors 
is good enough for us/* he replied, quite 
satisfied that the last word possible upon 
the subject had been said. 

The women are even greater sticklers for 
custom than the men ; they are also harder 
to reach. This is true even among the 
** purdah " women, wives of natives of 
India. Although these women are kept 
prisoners within their homes, yet in spite 
even of this they cling to their old tradi- 
tions more strenuously than their sons and 
husbands. The men go out into the world, 
rub shoulders with men of other faiths and 
customs ; more important still, they meet 
Western civilization and its leveling influ- 
ences at every turn, and are influenced, 
sometimes unconsciously, it is true, but 
influenced they are without doubt, and if it 
were not for the counter-influence exerted 
along the old lines by their women at home 
they would drift even farther than they do. 
Thus we see the strange phenomenon 
that the greatest supporters of caste 
and the old heathen customs among the 
natives of India are the greatest sufferers 
from these oppressive customs. Fortu- 

21 



®DO0 anD jenD6 ttom ipagoDa XanD 

nately there is no caste system among the 
natives of Burma ; the Burmese women are 
as free as the men. 

Not only are the Burmese women free, 
but they are great traders, driving better 
bargains and possessing better business 
heads often than the men. I know many 
women who will go several days' journey 
up the river in a boat, buying all the rice 
that is to be had, bring it down to their 
homes and hold it for a rise in price, in fact, 
"engineer a corner," while their husbands 
remain at home, look after the babies, and 
keep the little store in the front of the 
house. 

Burma should be, in fact, a veritable 
paradise for the " women's rights " woman. 
One can see a score of Burmese women, 
any day in the week or any hour of the 
morning pass along the road in front of the 
mission house, carrying a paddle upon their 
shoulders with a big basket of rice at either 
end. These women have risen long before 
daylight, loaded their boat with rice, pad- 
dled it down the river for miles; have car- 
ried their heavy loads over sand-banks, up 
the steep river-bank, into bazaar ; have bar- 
gained for the best price possible and later 
in the day will pole their boat, loaded 

22 



Cbaractcristics ot tbe ipeople 

down with bazaar goods, up the river to 
their village in the jungle. They had 
already helped to plant, to transplant, to 
reap, husk, and sift this rice too. 

Women very often act as brokers, es- 
pecially in the sale of jewelry. In Burma 
banks, except in the great cities and among 
foreigners, are practically unknown. The 
government conducts a savings bank in 
connection with the post-office, but the vast 
majority of Burmans do not use it or even 
know anything about it. Instead, if a man 
has any large amount of money he wishes 
to hold, he either buries it or buys jewelry, 
usually bracelets, rings, or precious stones. 
If he wishes to use any money he sells a 
ring, a ruby, or a diamond, as the case may 
be, exactly as a business man in America 
draws a check upon his bank account. This 
way of holding his wealth not only feeds 
his vanity and love for display but makes 
it easy to hold it in comparative safety, 
much easier than in hard cash. There is 
one bad feature, however, about it, and 
that is in case he needs money he some- 
times has to dispose of his jewelry at a loss ; 
people, knowing his needs, take advantage 
of his position and refuse to buy except at 
a price much below the real value, 
23 



®DD0 anD BnOa from iPagoDa XanD 

These transactions make a broker or go- 
between necessary, and this broker is usu- 
ally a woman. I have often seen one of 
these women with several hundred rupees' 
worth of rings, gold, or rubies upon her 
hands and arms. They visit the homes of 
would-be buyers, conduct the bartering and 
chaffering, and sell the jewels, taking as 
their share of the bargain a small broker- 
age fee. !n spite of this freedom, however, 
the men sometimes find it necessary to 
assert their authority over their wives by 
means of a stick or the sole of a shoe. 

A very funny story was told me by one 
of the earlier missionaries to the Shans. 
During the hot season all the missionaries 
in a certain station went to the hills to 
escape the terrible heat of a summer on the 
plains, and upon returning to their work at 
the beginning of the rains it began to be 
whispered around that one of the chief 
pillars of the Shan church, a deacon and a 
preacher, in fact, had been guilty of beating 
his wife during a family quarrel. 

The deacon was thereupon haled before 
the missionary, who labored with the man, 
laying stress upon the fact that his being a 
deacon made his misbehavior all the worse ; 
he ought to set a good example, etc., and 
24 



Cbaracteri0tic0 ot tbe people 

wound up by saying that he would have to 
be disciplined by the church. 

This was, of course, a terrible thing, but 
the case became simply alarming when the 
deacon asked who would try him for his 
offense. **Why the church, of course," 
he was told. " Good," he replied, ** but I 
might as well tell you now as later that I 
am not the only church-member that beat 
his wife while you were upon the hills, in 
fact, every one that has a wife did it ; the 
only ones who did not were boys who have 
none ! " 

So the case against the deacon was 
dropped, but not before one of the younger 
men came to the missionary and said, 
*' Teacher, you tell us we must not beat 
our wives ; now, soya, if I tell my wife to 
do a certain thing and she will not do it, if 
I am not allowed by the church rules to 
give her a whipping, will you please tell me 
what I am to do 7 " Query. 

Doctor Henderson, of Mongnai, also tells 
a funny story of one of his people. This 
man declared the Bible said it was right 
and proper for a man to beat his wife, and 
when asked to produce chapter and verse 
said, " Does not the Bible say, ' A rod for 
a fool's back ' .? " 

25 



©DOS anO BnOs from ipagoDa XanD 

The Burman is, of course, superstitious ; 
every ignorant person is, of whatever rank 
or race he may be. It is because of this 
that schools and Western education are 
such levers for uprooting superstitions, old 
almost as the race. Burmans, keen as they 
are at bargaining and trade, and in many 
other ways, can along certain lines be easily 
imposed upon. For example : A few miles 
above Bhamo is a large village in which is 
a pagoda badly in need of repairing, but the 
necessary money not being forthcoming, a 
priest suddenly discovered that a miracle 
had happened or rather was happening each 
day at a certain hour. Every idol was 
sweating daily ! Of course the news was 
hastily brought to the city and forthwith 
hundreds went out to see the perspiring 
god, and to tell their friends upon their re- 
turn that it was really a fact. There was 
no denying it. Hundreds saw the sweat 
run down the idols, marveled, prayed, and 
incidentally made offerings, which greatly 
aided the priests in their design in renova- 
ting the pagoda, monastery, and compound. 
Of course the solution of the mystery was 
easy. The idols were seated in niches, it 
was toward the close of the cold season, 
the nights were still very chilly and the 
26 



Cbaracterl0tiC6 ot tbc ipeople 

idols, of course, became very cold indeed. 
Along by eleven or twelve o'clock, how- 
ever, the sun gained great power and water 
was condensed upon the smooth, shining 
faces of the idols. It was useless, however, 
to offer such an explanation to the great 
mass of people ; it was laughed to scorn 
and practically the whole city was thor- 
oughly convinced that a wonderful miracle 
had been wrought in the village and that 
great merit could be gained by visiting the 
pagoda and praying before the idols there. 

Some years ago news came from Lower 
Burma that an idol had spoken to a very 
holy priest and had prophesied that the 
British were about to leave the country and 
the king of Burma would " receive his own 
again." The rumor was so persistent that 
it was investigated by a government official 
and, it is needless to say, was proved false, 
but almost every Burman that heard it took 
it for truth and believed it implicitly. 

The jungle people, especially the Shans 
upon the hills, are suspicious and not given 
to trust strangers. I have heard men be- 
longing to the government public works 
department, engaged in building roads, say 
that when they first entered a district they 
had to pay the wages of the coolies night 
2^ 



®Dt)0 anO J6nD0 trom iPasoDa XanD 

by night directly the day's work was done, 
otherwise every coolie, thinking he would 
receive nothing for his work, would quit 
and return to his village. Poor fellows ! 
they had for years been accustomed to be 
cheated by their own rulers so that it is no 
wonder they expected the white men to act 
in the same way and that at least some of 
the money ** would stick to the palm " of 
the officials. 

Among the jungle people especially every- 
thing out of the common or difficult to 
understand is looked upon as supernatural 
and therefore worthy of suspicion. Soon 
after we arrived at Mongnai in the Southern 
Shan States, several native chiefs came to 
visit us. Among the wonderful things in 
our house was a sewing-machine and my 
wife spent quite a long time in exhibiting 
its marvels. She commenced by simply 
sewing two pieces of muslin together, and 
loud were the praises bestowed upon the 
machine. It sewed so fast, and so smoothly, 
and so evenly ! A thing good to marvel at ! 
Wonderful, was the universal opinion, but 
when my wife put on the tucker, the friller, 
and the fandangle-maker their wonder knew 
no bounds. One chief especially — he was 
a Tounthu and not a Shan, by the way — was 
28 



Cbaractcri6tic0 ot tbe ipcople 

so much impressed that after looking at it 
for a while he edged further and further 
away and finally jumped up and left the 
house. 

As he did so he exclaimed, ** Teacher, 
you must excuse my leaving in such a 
hurry, but this machine is such a wonderful 
thing, it does so many strange things, each 
one stranger and more wonderful than the 
last, that I am not sure what it cannot do ; 
it might hurt me, and so as I have some 
business — I'll leave now," and he did, 
neither would he afterward enter our house. 

Of course it must be distinctly under- 
stood that this happened upon the Shan 
hills, far away from the railroad, and more 
than a dozen years ago. The sewing- 
machine is a very common sight in the 
cities ; in fact the Singer Sewing Machine 
Company has agencies in a number of large 
towns both in Upper and Lower Burma. 

The Shan is a born trader. He will start 
from his home with several buffalo hides 
and carry them for several days' journey 
over the mountains to the city, and sell 
them there, netting a profit, after cost of 
food, etc., has been deducted, of perhaps 
three or four annas a day (six to eight cents) 
and yet the same man would not do coolie 
29 



©D&6 anD BnD0 tcom pagoDa XanD 

work day after day for the customary hire 
of eight annas (sixteen cents) for a day's 
worl<, although the labor required would be 
no harder than carrying four malodorous 
buffalo hides over mountains and across 
plains for four or five days — buffalo hides 
are no light weight either when they are 
green. Every man to his taste, and that is 
Shan taste. 

Fortunately there is a great deal of humor 
in the make-up of the native Burman and 
in this he again differs from the native of 
India, that is, the native as we find him in 
Burma. I remember once going out into 
the jungle several miles upon my bicycle, 
and as the day was very hot I rested for a 
while upon the side of a bank beneath the 
shade of a tree, and while there a num- 
ber of Shans from Nam Kham came along, 
and seeing the machine lying at the side of 
the road stopped to look at it. One of their 
number had been to Bhamo before and was 
proud to show off the knowledge gained 
there. He told his friends that the strange- 
looking thing was really a carriage that, 
although it was composed of but two wheels, 
really and truly ran upright. He did not 
know just how the foreigners managed to 
do it, but they did; it was another proof of 
30 



Cbaractcristics ot the ipcoplc 

the wisdom and skill of the wonderful 
kallahs. 

He was much surprised when I joined in 
the conversation, and said he did not know 
that I spoke Shan ; his friends were from 
the jungle, he said, upon their first visit to 
the city, and he was glad they had a chance 
of seeing one of its wonders so soon. Then 
I explained to them how the bicycle stood 
upright and ran along and finally said : 

'* Now, this is the best of ponies. It can 
run so fast that no Shan pony could catch 
it ; it never shies, never gets frightened, 
never runs away; yet I do not have to feed 
it; I give it no paddy, no hay, no bran, not 
even water. What do you think of that 
for a horse? " 

The old man looked at the wheel, then 
with a smile, he said : 

** It is true as your lordship says, you 
never feed it, still, don't you think it looks 
very thin? " 

There is one characteristic about every 
inhabitant of Burma, whether natives of 
Burma or India, and that is they are afraid 
of exceeding their orders; they will do 
nothing except what is expressly ordered. 
For example : Some years ago we were 
traveling from Rangoon to Toungoo by train. 
31 



©DD0 anD j£nt>0 from ipagoDa XanD 

We soon found that the train was running 
much behind time and asked the conductor, 
or *' guard " as he is called, what the trou- 
ble was. He told us that the engine then 
hauling the train had been built to burn 
wood, but they were experimenting with 
Burmese coal instead, and as it did not 
make so much steam as the wood, they 
could not get as much speed out of the lo- 
comotive, and so we crept along till we got 
to a slight rise a few miles south of our 
destination when we were stalled com- 
pletely. After an hour's wait the engineer 
was able to get up enough steam to climb 
the rise and we came limping into the sta- 
tion a couple of hours after everybody had 
gone to bed. 

The first thing I saw when our train en- 
tered the station was another locomotive 
with the steam whistling out of the vent 
pipe, and enough in the boiler to pull a 
train twice as heavy as ours. I asked the 
station-master what that locomotive was 
doing there. ** That is to take the train on 
from here to Yemathin," he said. **Did 
you not know that we were stalled seven 
miles out?" I asked. *'Of course,'* he 
replied. ** The train was signalled as hav- 
ing left the last station and I knew it was 
32 



Cbaractcctstica ot tbc people 

stuck somewhere, most likely at the 
bridge." " You did, and here was this en- 
gine nearly blowing itself up with steam, 
why on earth did you not send it to us to 
help us out of our difficulty? " 

The station-master looked at me as 
though he thought I was crazy. ** I dared 
not send that engine south," he said, ** it 
would have been as much as my place was 
worth. I am not ordered to send that lo- 
comotive down but up.** ** That's the dif- 
ference between my country and yours," 
I said. *' Why, my friend, if you allowed 
an engine to stand idle when you knew a 
train was in trouble you would have lost 
your position and served you right too." 

It is the same thing everywhere. Almost 
every official is afraid to do certain things 
which obviously ought to be done, for fear 
of being " rapped over the knuckles " by 
his superior. Nobody ever wishes to do 
anything upon his own authority; nobody 
ever wants to shoulder a responsibility if he 
can push it off on somebody else. 

Our school receives grants from govern- 
ment, and we sometimes have a lot of 
trouble because something is not quite in 
order or according to the laws sacred to red 
tape. Once in a while a figure is not en- 
C 33 



©t>D0 anD JBnbe from iPagoDa XanD 

tered or a column has not been filled out or 
some silly little thing is the matter. Then, 
although the bills have been paid month 
after month for years, that special bill is 
sent back with a printed list of objections, 
as long as your arm, with the one objection 
which the bill suffers from marked with a 
cross. This often means a lot of official 
correspondence, and a great expenditure of 
paper, ink, and postage, not to mention the 
strain upon one's temper, when a little 
horse-sense would have settled it all. 
Dickens' story of the Circumlocution Office 
and how not to do it often comes to one's 
mind, and one wonders why Great Britain 
brought such shackles of red tape with her 
when she started out to conquer the Orient. 
Like most Orientals the native of Burma 
is ashamed of any sort of menial work, or 
what he considers menial work. I have 
known a Eurasian boy ashamed to carry a 
bottle to the dispensary to get medicine, 
although he was not ashamed to take the 
medicine for nothing. He would be ashamed 
to carry a suit of clothes in a bundle from 
the tailor, although he had not paid for 
them, neither did he intend to. A person no 
sooner gets a little money or a good posi- 
tion than he suffers an acute attack of 
34 



Cbaractcristics ot tbe ipcople 

** swelled head." Cannot do this, cannot 
do that, cannot do the other ! He must 
have somobody **to follow" him when he 
goes out, has any number of hangers-on 
around his house whom he feeds and keeps 
in laziness; in fact becomes a patron in the 
old meaning of the term. 

A native cannot understand a person 
digging in his garden, for instance, or doing 
any form of manual work for the pleasure 
there is in it. Mr. Hanson, one of our mis- 
sionaries, told me a few weeks ago that his 
literary work kept him at his desk for so 
many hours a day that he felt the need of 
more exercise, and accordingly took a hoe 
and did a little gardening each evening. 
One night, just as he was finishing, a native 
officer belonging to the regiment of sepoys 
stationed at the fort came to him and see- 
ing him engaged in digging his own garden 
asked him how it was that he, a white man, 
could not afford to call a gardener to keep 
it in order for him. The fact that a man 
should like to do such work was beyond 
his comprehension. 

This idea is not confined to persons born 

in Burma either, for the white man catches 

the disease. Men who at home blacked 

their shoes every morning of their lives, 

35 



©DDs anD BnDa from pagoDa XanD 

soon after getting to Burma cannot even 
put their shoes on in the morning or kick 
them off at night, but have to call their 
servant to do it for them. 

A man in charge of the police in one of 
the Upper Burma districts once showed me 
a bicycle he had just brought from home. I 
asked him whether he had ridden much in 
England, but he said, no, it was too much 
bother cleaning the mud off the wheel when 
he got back to his house : *' A fellow has 
to do that sort of thing himself at home, 
don't ye know," he said. Here was a man, 
then, who had to clean the mud off his own 
bike in England, but he compelled Burmans 
to kneel when they spoke to him, and 
** piled on the agony " like a duke. 

After a stay in Burma one looks at many 
expressions found in the Bible in an entirely 
different manner ; many things can be un- 
derstood which at home appeared strange. 
For example. The dog of the Bible is not 
the faithful, brave friend that he is in Amer- 
ica, but the snarling, cowardly, pariah dog, 
with all the bad traits of his cousin at home 
but very few of the good ones. 

** Take a present in thine hand " ; how 
often we read that expression in the Bible, 
and how often do we see the act here. It 

36 



Cbatacteri6tiC6 ot tbe people 

is customary to take a present when visit- 
ing a superior, not necessarily as a bribe, 
but as " custom." 

**Take thy shoes from off thy feet," 
commanded God, and to-day when enter- 
ing Moslem mosque, Hindu temple, Bud- 
dhist monastery, or Christian church, the 
worshipers leave their shoes outside. 

The American Baptist Publication Society 
publishes a Sunday-school Lesson Picture 
Roll illustrating the Sunday-school lessons, 
and we have used them for years in our 
school. In writing to the Society once I 
asked why they did not make the men in 
the picture take off their sandals before 
entering the temple. Here, for example, 
was the picture of a priest entering a syna- 
gogue with his sandals on ! For a man to 
enter a Christian church with his hat on 
and smoking a cigar would be much less 
profanation than that shown in the picture. 
Just as we take off our hats upon entering 
a house, so the Burman leaves his shoes 
upon the front step. 

The Burman dress is very picturesque. 
The men wear a gay-colored silk handker- 
chief twisted around their heads, a linen 
jacket, and a silk skirt, usually pink. The 
everyday skirt is called a lotm gyei, but 
37 



O^^e anD BnDs trom iPagoDa XanD 

upon high days and holidays the Burman 
wears a ptsoe, which is so long that after it 
has been put around his waist the end can 
be twisted over his neck and yet leave 
enough to hang over his arm. 

His shoes are of two kinds ; one a sort 
of slipper without any back, just a toe- 
piece and a sole, and the other a sandal, 
the sole of which is made either of leather 
or wood, with straps to hold it on. These 
straps pass between the great toe and the 
others, cross the front of the foot, and are 
fastened one to each side of the sole. 

The women on common days wear a 
skirt very similar to the men except that it 
is draped a little differently, but upon holi- 
days they wear a tamain which is nothing 
but a large, oblong piece of silk fastened 
at the waist, but opened down the front, 
leaving the limbs below the knee exposed. 
They wear a white linen jacket, and instead 
of twisting a silk handkerchief around their 
heads like their brothers, they wear it 
around the neck with the ends flowing. 
They have a very pretty custom of making 
wreaths of flowers and wearing them in 
their hair. 

The Shan women who live in the South- 
ern Shan States dress like the Burmese 

38 



Cbaracteristlcs of tbe people 

women, but up North the dress is very 
different, being made of dark blue cloth, 
sometimes with broad stripes of other colors 
up and down the skirt. They wear a turban 
of blue cloth also. 

The two most distinctive marks of a Shan 
man's dress are his hat and his trousers. 
The former is made of plaited straw, and 
is a great, flapping concern with a brim a 
foot wide, and is worn perched upon the 
very top of a tall turban. His trousers are a 
sight to behold too. Imagine a sack some- 
what wider at the bottom than the top; cut 
off the two bottom corners for the wearer 
to put his feet through, tie the mouth of the 
sack around the man's waist and you know 
what a pair of Shan trousers look like. 
They are made so baggy that the part that 
should be the seat often touches the ground. 

Men and women both wear earrings 
among the Shans ; the men, however, 
sometimes having but one ear pierced. 
These earrings are usually round, the 
smaller kinds looking when in place some- 
thing like a stud or shirt button, but some- 
times the holes are so large that a man can 
thrust a lead pencil through them. I have 
frequently seen Shans carry the stump of 
an unfinished cigar in the hole in their ear. 

39 



®OD0 anD JSnDs trom pagoDa XanO 

After firing a forty-five caliber revolver, 
coolies have often begged for the empty 
shells to be used as earrings. Among the 
Burmese women some earrings are very 
valuable, as many as a score of pearls or 
rubies being set in one ring. The natives 
of India (women) wear nose-rings, but for- 
tunately that custom is unknown among 
the Burmans. 

Every Burman and Shan boy is tatooed 
from above the waist to below the knee. 
The color is blue, and represents dragons, 
griffins, and other fabulous animals, with 
scrolls, flowers, etc. In addition to this 
among the Shans it is common custom to 
have the back and breast tattooed. This 
must be a painful operation to say the least. 
The boy is placed upon the ground and the 
figure to be tattooed is drawn in pigment 
upon the skin ; then a friend takes his seat 
upon the small boy to keep him down and 
keep him still and the tattooing commences. 
The instrument used is generally made out 
of a section of small bamboo, and inside 
this works a needle with a chisel-shaped 
point. The boy naturally howls a little 
during the operation, but it is custom, and 
each boy is proud of his tattooing and so 
keeps up a brave front. 
40 



Cbatactcristtcs ot tbe people 

Tobacco-smoking is carried to great ex- 
cess in Burma. Everybody smokes — men, 
women, and children. The usual cheroot 
is a mixture of tobacco leaves and small 
chips of the tobacco stalk. The latter is 
dried separately in the sun, mixed with the 
shredded tobacco leaves, and the whole is 
rolled up in a cover of corn shucks, making 
a cigar eight inches long. An immense 
number of these cigars is smoked. Upon 
the hills pipes are used, and I once saw a 
child at its mother's breast with a pipe in 
its hand which it had been smoking. 
Children are sometimes not weaned till 
they are three years old, which was about 
the age of this child as nearly as I could 
guess. Of late years the American cigar- 
ette has invaded the country, and on 
account of its cheapness has become 
immensely popular. 

Betel-nut chewing is another universal 
habit. The nut is the fruit of a beautiful 
palm, and is about the size and shape of a 
nutmeg. A small piece of the nut is cut 
off by an instrument something like a pair 
of nut-crackers, except that it has a cut- 
ting edge. The little piece of betel nut is 
placed in the center of a green leaf upon 
which a little lime has been spread ; this 
41 



©D06 anD EnD6 trom ipagoDa XanD 

lime is slacked and powdered till it is about 
the same consistency as butter; then a 
piece of gum, red in color and astringent 
like alum, is added, the leaf is rolled up, 
and the whole placed in the mouth and 
chewed. The saliva expectorated is blood- 
red, and makes a very ugly stain wherever 
it is spit. The teeth of the chewer are also 
blackened, and when used to excess the 
lime and astringent gum act upon the 
gums so that they contract, the teeth often 
become loose, and in severe cases even 
drop out. 

Fortunately the opium habit is not so 
prevalent in Burma as in China ; still many 
Burmans are addicted to its use. This is 
especially true of Upper Burma, so close to 
China. Many men smoke a little and are 
not opium drunkards ; still, the habit once 
formed is very, very hard to break. Some 
observers say it is never broken, and I must 
confess I have never personally seen a case 
where a man has given up the habit for good. 
I have seen many, many cases in which 
men claimed to have given it up, but they 
took it upon the sly, not smoking, perhaps, 
as that can be readily detected, but eating 
opium pills instead ; the effect was prac- 
tically the same. Opium acts upon the 
42 



Cbaracteristics ot tbe people 

moral part of a man ; he will steal, lie, do 
anything, in fact, to get his daily smoke, 
and if he really cannot get it his condition 
is pitiable in the extreme. 

Unfortunately drunkenness is increasing 
to an alarming extent in the towns of 
Burma. This is directly due to British 
influence. In the old days this vice was 
practically unknown among the Burmans, 
and it has been introduced by the Anglo- 
Saxon conquerors. The Karens, Kachins, 
and other hill tribes, it is true, have always 
been addicted to the use of alcohol, but not 
the Burmans, who looked down upon these 
hill people as being little better than savages. 
Now, however, there are grog shops all 
over Burma, and many Burmans, especially 
the younger ones, use it, and the habit is 
spreading. Several boys who used to be 
in my school now use alcohol constantly. 
This is a blot, a very great blot, upon 
England's fair fame. 

The officials and other European resi- 
dents set a very bad example. Almost 
every white man drinks, many to excess. 
I once saw at a durbar in the Southern 
Shan States an official high in the civil 
service trying to persuade native princes 
to drink champagne and whisky, and when 
43 



©DDs anO BnOs from pa^ioDa %nn^ 

they would not, he huighed at tliem. 
Imagine the intluence of that man ! 

There is no ceremony among the Bur- 
mans which is solemn ; at least 1 have 
never seen one. Even religious rites have 
no solemnity as we understand the term. 
Men and women kneeling before idols with 
their hands clasped, stare around them 
while they mumble over their prayers ; 
offerings of rice placed before idols are 
often eaten by pariah dogs and crows be- 
fore the backs of the worshipers are turned ; 
even funerals are devoid of solemnity. 
When a person dies it is true the women 
shriek, beat their breasts, and tear their 
hair, but only for a short time, then the 
whole house is turned into a show-room 
with the dead body in the center and 
friends congregate and play, feast, laugli, 
and joke till the funeral procession is 
formed. Then everything is noise and 
confusion. Alen shout and rush hither 
and thither ; the very bearers of the cot"tin 
joke among themselves and when at last 
they get to the cemetery, from the row of 
unfeeling Buddhist priests to the man in 
the ox-cart who hands out bottles of lem- 
onade to whoever asks for it, everything 
is noisy, grotesque, and to Western e\'es 
44 



Gbacactecl0ttc0 of tbe people 

almost indecent. So much for the Burman 
and his cousin the Shan. 

An entirely different man is the Kachin 
who lives upon the hills of Upper Burma. 
One may see their villages perched upon 
the very summits of what in the distance 
appear to be almost inaccessible hills. For 
generations this tribe was a thorn in the 
side of the Burman government. Like the 
Highlanders in old Scotland, they made 
forays into the plains, burned villages, 
stole cattle, killed right and left, and then 
retreated to their mountain fastnesses 
carrying their plunder with them. The 
Burmans were powerless to punish the 
Kachins. Of course, semi-occasionally 
they sent troops out in pursuit of the 
raiders, but such expeditions amounted to 
practically nothing; in fact sometimes they 
did more harm than good. A great many 
gongs would be beaten, a few shots fired, 
perhaps, but that was all. Then the Bur- 
man soldiers would return to the city where 
they were safe behind their stockades, while 
the Kachins would descend upon some other 
unfortunate village in another direction. 
Occasionally, however, the Burmans would 
be able to ambush their enemies, then there 
45 



©DOS anD BnD6 from iPa^oDa XanO 

would be something more than a mere fight, 
there would be a massacre. 

Of course, under British rule, this has 
all been stopped. Raids have ceased and 
the lawless mountaineers have been taught 
that they cannot now pillage a village with 
impunity as in the old days. Nay, worse 
than that, they have to pay taxes to the 
government, something they would have 
laughed at had it been demanded by the 
Burmans a quarter of a century ago. But, 
and a very large but too, " You English do 
not fight like the Burmans did,'' grumbled 
a Kachin chief once. " In the old days 
when we heard the Burmans were coming 
we would build a stockade across the 
mountain pass, then when the enemy put 
in an appearance we would fire a few shots 
and he would go back again, but even if 
some of your men are wounded or even 
killed, it does not make any difference to 
the rest of you, but you come rushing on, 
shouting and firing till you jump clear over 
our stockade ! Ah, there's a very great 
difference between you and Burmans." 

The Kachin has learned to respect the 
mounted infantry, and the mountain bat- 
tery still more. Carried upon the backs of 
mules, the guns of the battery are trans- 
46 



Cbaractert0tic0 ot tbe ipeople 

ported over the mountains, then set up, 
sometimes upon the top of another hill, far 
out of reach of Kachin bullets ; then shells 
drop into the village and behind the stock- 
ade, explode, and do an immense amount 
of injury, while the hill men are helpless 
and can do nothing to retaliate. 

Like all hill tribes the Kachin is intensely 
clannish and also very revengeful. He will 
treasure up the memory of a slight for years 
till he has a chance of carrying out his 
revenge. In the old days blood feuds were 
common, so common in fact that if one 
met a Kachin anywhere and were to ask 
him where his home was the man would 
always lie and give the name of another 
village because he feared the person that 
addressed him might belong to a tribe with 
which his own was at feud. 

It might be over a foolish, childish thing 
too, that is, foolish in our eyes, but not as 
the Kachin looks at it. A few months ago 
Rev. and Mrs. Hanson, Kachin missionaries 
in Bhamo, took a jungle trip over the hills, 
and upon her return, Mrs. Hanson told my 
wife of an experience in one of the moun- 
tain villages. Upon their arrival at this 
particular village all the people received 
them gladly except the wife of the chief, 
47 



©DO0 anD JEnD0 trom iPagoDa XanD 

and she would not say a word to Mrs. Han- 
son, although she talked with the other 
members of the party. Although the chief 
and everybody else chatted around the fire 
in the largest house in the village this 
woman maintained a dogged silence in spite 
of everything that Mrs. Hanson could do or 
say. Of course something was wrong, but 
the difficulty was to find out what it was. 
Finally it was discovered that the woman 
thought that Mrs. Hanson was the wife of 
another missionary. A dozen years before 
this Kachin woman had come down from 
the hills on a visit to Bhamo and had been 
rudely treated, as she thought, by the wife 
of one of the missionaries, and for all these 
years she had nursed this grudge in her 
heart. When she was assured that she 
had made a mistake and that Mrs. Hanson 
was what she really claimed to be, there 
was no more trouble and she became as 
friendly as her neighbors. 

Here is another story : Years ago an old 
woman came from her home in the moun- 
tains to visit friends that had come down 
upon the plains to live. During her visit 
she was taken sick and died. The villagers 
thereupon killed a cow as an offering to 
the nats (fairies), wrapped her body in a 
48 



Cbaracteri6tlc6 ot tbc people 

blanket, bought a gong to beat during the 
funeral rites and, in short, acted the part 
of good neighbors to the dead woman. 
When the bill was sent to her sons, how- 
ever, they refused to pay, and this fact 
was 'Maid up against them'* by the men 
who were compelled to put their hands into 
their pockets to pay for the cow, blanket, 
and gong. 

In course of years the grandson of the 
old woman became a teacher in the Kachin 
Mission School at Bhamo and wished to 
marry the granddaughter of the head man 
of the village where the old woman had 
died; but when, according to Kachin cus- 
tom, he sent a friend to ask for the girl's 
hand, he was told by her grandfather that 
he must pay for that cow, gong, and blanket 
before they would even listen to his suit. 

After a man is dead we usually ** let his 
faults die with him," but among this strange 
hill people, if the dead man dies a debtor the 
fact is proclaimed to every wayfarer that 
passes by his grave, for his tomb cannot be 
completed till every debt has been paid by 
his family. Years may pass but the grave 
remains unfinished, nay, it may fall a prey 
to white ants and be destroyed first be- 
cause his sons will not or cannot settle his 
D 49 



^DDs ant) lBnt>6 from U^agoDa Xan5 

debts. Should they be paid in full, how- 
ever, the grave will be completed with ap- 
propriate ceremonies and the man is at last 
** buried'* as the Kachin puts it, although 
he may possibly have been beneath the 
ground for years. 

The revengeful spirit of these moun- 
taineers shows itself very early and some- 
times very unexpectedly too. Upon the 
Kachin mission compound was a boy in the 
mission school who had for years been 
taught, fed, and clothed by the mission. 
He was guilty of some fault — I do not know 
just what it was — and was warned that the 
next time he did it he would be punished. 
Before long he committed the same offense 
and was sent by his teacher to the mis- 
sionary for punishment. He went to the 
Mission House, but first slipped into his 
own room, got a knife, and as the mis- 
sionary came out upon the veranda, at- 
tacked him with it, although as he after- 
ward said, he knew he deserved a good 
whipping. 

Of course the Kachin is intensely igno- 
rant. Like his cousins, the Karens in Lower 
Burma, he had no written language till Mr. 
Hanson, of our mission, devised an alphabet, 
wrote a grammar, and reduced the language 
50 



Cbaracteristics of tbc f>eople 

to writing. This ignorance is profound. It is 
hard, impossible in fact, for a Westerner to 
appreciate how deep it really is even after 
living among them for years. Like all igno- 
rant people too, they are suspicious and 
liable to think that one is trying to fool 
them when talking upon a subject they are 
not familiar with. Mr. Hanson told me 
that some months ago Mr. Roberts, the 
senior Kachin missionary in Bhamo, was 
with him upon the hills during an eclipse of 
the moon. The natives, in great excite- 
ment, rushed about beating gongs, shout- 
ing, and making hideous noises, trying to 
frighten away the great frog which at times 
of eclipse is supposed to be engaged in the 
rather difficult task of eating the moon. 
After everything was over, the frog fright- 
ened away and the moon saved, Mr. Han- 
son tried to explain to them the real condi- 
tion of affairs, but when they heard that 
the world was round, that people lived all 
around it upon the outside and yet did not 
go sliding away off into space, they showed 
clearly that they did not believe any such 
foolishness, and after the talk, when the 
missionaries were supposed to be sound 
asleep, one of them heard a Kachin remark 
in aloud whisper to a friend at his side, "My, 
51 



otitis an& iBnbe from iPagoDa XanD 

but those missionaries know how to lie, 
don't they ? " 

The dress of a Kachin man is practically 
the same as a Shan's, only dirtier. The 
women wear a piece of cloth, which is 
wrapped around their waist and laps in 
front. Their jackets are made of blue cloth 
decorated with lines of shells or common 
bone buttons. The most remarkable part 
of a Kachin woman's dress, however, is her 
girdle, which is made out of a great number 
of rattan rings. It is worn outside the skirt, 
and I have never been able to make out 
just why she encumbers herself with it, for 
it certainly is not pretty, and it is still more 
certain that it serves no useful purpose. 
The wearer would tell you it was custom 
to wear it. That settles it and admits of 
no argument or change either. 

The Kachins are very dirty. It would 
be difficult for an American to understand 
just how dirty they are. They often go for 
months without bathing, and their clothes 
— I am afraid of being charged with exag- 
geration were I to write just what they look 
like ; and the smell is even more striking. 
Still it must be kept in mind that, while the 
Burman builds his village upon the banks 
of a river and a moment or two is generally 
52 



Cbacactcrl0t(c0 ot tbe ipeople 

sufficient to carry him to it for a bath, the 
Kachin builds his home upon the very top 
of a mountain. The nearest spring is often 
a mile or more away from his village and 
sometimes several hundred feet below, with 
nothing but a path, steep nearly as the side 
of a house, between him and it, and up this 
path all water has to be carried. It is small 
wonder, then, that the Kachin is chary of 
using water under such conditions. 

One of the most ludicrous scenes in Burma 
is to see a Kachin in bazaar. His jacket and 
trousers are most likely much the worse for 
wear because, since their purchase months 
before, they have never been put into water 
save when their owner has been caught 
out in a rainstorm or has had to v/ade 
through a river, yet he is very likely to 
have a great turban of white muslin, yards 
long, which has been twisted around his 
head, on top of the old one, which has 
changed in color from its original white to 
a deep slate color, closely verging toward 
the hue of Lehigh coal. 

Burma is the richest province in the 
Indian empire, and in it wages are very 
much higher than in India proper, the con- 
sequence being that many thousands of the 
53 



©ODs anD BnDs trom iPagoDa XanD 

natives of India have emigrated to Burma, 
where they act much like the Italians in 
the United States. These hallahs, as the 
Burman calls them, have spread all over 
the land. They do a large amount of coolie 
work ; the fighting races enter the army 
and the police ; others open stalls in bazaar, 
drive ox-carts or gharries^ and act as serv- 
ants to Europeans or even rich Burmans 
and Chinamen, They are messengers at 
court, durwans or watchmen of bunga- 
lows, porters on the railroads ; and a hun- 
dred other positions are filled by these 
natives of India. They bring their religion 
and many of their customs with them too, 
so that there is a mosque for Mohammedans 
and a temple for Hindus in every large town 
of the province. 

One of the most interesting classes among 
the natives of India is the bahoo or 
clerk. A large percentage of subordinate 
government positions is filled by these 
bahoos. The post-office, the courts, the 
government telegraph, commissariat, the 
public works department, and the subordi- 
nate grade of the Indian medical service all 
offer positions to him. He often hails from 
Bengal and is then distressingly polite and 
takes himself very seriously, especially if 
54 



Cbaractcristics ot tbc ipcople 

he has graduated from an Indian university. 
In such a case he just loves to wallow in 
polysyllables and never uses a short word if 
he can possibly use several long ones. For 
example, I once received a note which said : 

Sir : I have the honour to take the liberty of for- 
warding herewith, per bearer, the exhausted recep- 
tacle for your considerate replenishment. 

In simple English, he sent a bottle and 
wanted it refilled, but preferred to use what 
he thought a much grander way of making 
his request. 

Some of his brethren, however, have not 
been fortunate enough to receive a univer- 
sity education, but that does not prevent 
them from spilling ink upon every possible 
and impossible occasion. The following is 
a gem from the pen of a man in Bhamo : 

Father : Your sweeper Cauda Singh is suffering 
badly by Asthma a cough. When he sneeze The 
Cough fells from brain does not come out, by 
gethering at Chest he Cannot breath & is in great 
difficult 

Kindly give some medicine as I hear your name a 
very kind and gracious Father 

Here is another which was written to me 
by an ofificial in the post-office and falls 
about midway between the two extremes, 
55 



©DOS anO JEn^e trom pagoDa XanO 

but still shows the craze for using long 
words when shorter ones would do the 
work better : 

Sir : The patient is rather better and much im- 
proved now. We are very grateful to your honour 
for the kind support accorded him. When you come 
over other particulars will be intimated. 

I beg to remain, sir, your most obedient servant, 

A baboo, to use Thackeray's words, 
*' dearly loves a lord," and, as lords are 
scarce in Burma, he gives every title he 
can think of to whomsoever he writes. 

'' Honoured Sir," ** Most Respected Sir," 
*' Your Honour," and ** Most Honoured Sir" 
are the most common ways of addressing a 
letter, but last week I received a new title 
and was called ** Your Reverendship." Be- 
ing a missionary seems to some people's 
minds to entitle a man to be called ** Rev." 
although he has never been ordained, so 
that letters addressed to ** The Rev. Dr. 
Griggs " are common enough, but the very 
height was reached when a note came with 
" The Rev. Dr. William C. Griggs, Esq., 
M. D.," on it. Human ingenuity could not 
twist another title out of me. 

Baboo English has been the subject of 
many and many an Indian joke, and it 

56 



Cbaracterietics of tbe people 

certainly is very funny. Natives of India 
have a great habit of using the parti- 
ciple instead of the verb, ** eating" for 
'* eat," "running" instead of "run," etc. 
"Plenty" too, is an overworked word. 
" Plenty good," "plenty bad," and so on. 

A " boy " comes into the dispensary and 
says, "Head paining, sir." Then you 
know that he is not very sick, but if he 
says, " Head plenty paining, sir," you may 
feel sure he feels "plenty bad," while the 
superlative degree is reached when, with a 
woe-begone face he groans, " Head too 
much plenty paining, sir." 

The word "too" is also used strangely. 
" It is too bad " must not be understood in 
its American sense, for it means it is "very 
bad." A man became very hard up and 
brought around a petition setting forth that 
he was out of work, had a large family, 
had no money but many debts, as well as 
countless other woes, and begging "the 
charitable-minded gentlemen of the city 
and community " to help him get to Man- 
dalay, where he was promised work. 

I had attended his wife during a severe 

sickness, so going, I suppose, upon the 

Irishman's explanation of one good turn's 

deserving another, he brought his subscrip- 

57 



©DDs auD BnDa trom iPagoDa XanD 

tion list to me. I gave him a few rupees, 
and he then took his way to the house of 
another missionary. This gentleman did 
not know him and said so, upon which he 
said, *' Oh, Doctor Griggs knows me too 
well." He did not mean this, of course, 
in the way in which an American would 
take it, though as it turned out afterward 
it should have been taken in just that way. 

One class of natives of India, usually 
called the ** shopkeeper " class, contains, 
I think, some of the most expert rascals in 
the world. Cheating has become a fine 
art with them, and there is nothing they 
sell which must be taken at its face value. 
My wife has several times sent to bazaar 
for thread and found part of it had been 
used, although at first sight it looked like a 
full spool. Mr. Rockefeller's oil cans will 
sometimes have a minute hole in them 
through which quite a large amount of the 
oil has been drawn off and water put in its 
place, a crude way of ** watering oil stock." 

Some months ago I ran short of quinine 
in the dispensary because the steamer upon 
which was a fresh supply ran upon a sand- 
bank in the river, so I was obliged to send 
to the bazaar for some. The bottles seemed 
a good deal lighter than usual, I thought, 

58 



Cbaractetlstics ot tbe IPcople 

and yet the tin-foil capsules over the corks 
appeared to be intact. When I came to 
examine more closely, however, I found 
that they had been carefully removed, the 
paraffin beneath had been melted, and the 
cork withdrawn. Nearly one-third of the 
quinine had been extracted and the balance 
well shaken up to make it look all right, a 
comparatively easy thing to do, seeing how 
light quinine is. The cork had then been 
replaced, the paraffin carefully smoothed, 
and the capsule replaced so skilfully that it 
required careful looking to detect the fraud. 



59 



lEveris^bai? Sigbte an^ Sounbe 



II 



HE Burman is a trader, and buying 
and selling-places are therefore 
much in evidence. They run all 
the way from the big bazaars covering a 
large space of land, with concrete walks, 
iron roofs, and hundreds of stalls, such as 
one sees in the great cities, down to a row 
of crazy sheds made of crooked bamboo 
posts and thatch that has long since passed 
its term of usefulness, or the front of a 
house upon the floor of which are ex- 
posed for sale a few bunches of ancient 
bananas of doubtful look, a little curry stuff, 
and a few articles of hardware *' made in 
Germany." 

Away off upon the Shan hills, bazaar is 
held once in every five days. Here it is not 
only the trading-place, but is where every- 
body gathers from all the villages for miles 
around, coming in with coolie baskets laden 
with produce and, what is of almost as great 
consequence, with minds thirsting for the 
latest news or scandal, which is retailed 
together with the goods offered for sale. 
63 



Qt>t>6 and j£nDd from ipagoDa Uand 

Set apart is a place where gambling is 
carried on, and many a Shan leaves behind 
him all the money he gained from the sale 
of the goods he brought to bazaar ; the 
very coolie baskets they were brought in 
often remaining too, and sometimes even 
his blanket and sword. In Burma proper 
gambling is not allowed, fortunately, by 
the government, and '* gambler's row" 
does not exist; but in the Shan country, 
where native princes still rule the people 
under British protection and guidance, 
gambling booths are as much a part of 
every bazaar as those where rice, betel 
nut, or cloth is sold. 

A new-comer to Burma usually pays an 
early visit to the bazaar, but in the major- 
ity of cases it is not soon repeated. If one 
wishes to enjoy his beefsteak for breakfast, 
or the roast for dinner, it is advisable not 
to go to the place where they are sold. 
The smells one meets with there are very 
pronounced, especially in that part of bazaar 
where nga pe is sold. This nga pe is, per- 
haps, the most universally used dainty in 
Burma ; it enters into every meal, in fact, 
without it a meal would not be complete ; 
still, from a Western standpoint the smell 
is quite too strenuous. Nga pe is made of 

64 



JSvcrBs^aB Siflbts anD SounDs 

fish. They are split open, and after the 
bones have been taken out, are spread 
upon mats till they are extremely strong, 
then they are packed into bamboo baskets 
and pressed till the mass becomes like jelly 
and smells — well, like nga pe. Sometimes 
it is dried till it looks like a mixture of 
chipped glue and dust, but it does not smell 
the same ; even glue is innoxious when com- 
pared with nga pe. Now, if the reader will 
bear in mind the fact that in large bazaars 
there are often great heaps of nga pe^ he 
will not be surprised to learn that the air is 
malodorous. 

After the bazaar the next most common 
sight, perhaps, is a pwae, or feast. Pwaes 
are of many kinds. One of the most in- 
teresting is the dancing-doll pwae. The 
men who work these dolls are extremely 
skilful, especially when one takes into 
account the crude surroundings. First of 
all a platform is built, usually of bamboo, 
and a curtain is hung above it lengthwise, 
leaving a narrow ledge in front, but wide 
enough at the rear of the curtain for men 
to walk upon. A canopy is hung above all ; 
at night a band is stationed in front ; the 
stage is lit up and the dolls are made to 
dance upon the ledge before the curtain. 
E 65 



Fine strings are fastened to their heads, 
elbows, hands, etc., and by their means 
they are made to dance, kneel before kings 
in supplication, fight, go through the most 
complicated movements possible ; in fact, 
they act out whole dramas. 

Besides these there are plays in which 
men and women act. These are long and 
tedious, that is to Western ideas, but the 
Burman never wearies of them, although 
they sometimes take four or even five 
nights to finish. They are usually given 
by a person in search of popularity or 
merit, and in that case are exhibited free 
of cost ; anybody can sit down and enjoy 
the play, the whole of the expenses being 
borne by the man who has ** called" the 
players. They are often held at feasts, 
when a child is to be made into a priest, or 
on any holiday. 

A rough stage is set up in an open lot ; 
the background is made of mats decorated 
with pictures, shawls, or anything that can 
be borrowed ; the ever-present band takes 
up its station in front ; mats are spread 
upon the ground for the spectators to sit 
upon, a special place being reserved for the 
man who gives the play, and at dark it 
commences and continues all night, and for 
66 



as many nights thereafter as the pocket- 
book or the credit of the benefactor will 
stand the strain. 

People come and go ; they smoke, chew, 
laugh heartily at the buffoon and thoroughly 
enjoy themselves, having as good a time, 
probably, as an American would have in a 
grand opera house, although theirs is open 
to the sky, has nothing between them and 
the ground but a mat, has no tinsel, no 
footlights — except sometimes a few smoky 
lamps strung along the stage — no curtain, 
and no scenery. 

Hundreds of people often attend these 
free exhibitions, and the immediate neigh- 
borhood not only has lots of fun, but with 
an eye to business even turns it into profit. 
Fires are lit in the street and food is cooked 
and sold to the spectators, who often come 
from long distances to look on. A very 
favorite delicacy is a kind of glutinous rice 
mixed with native sugar and several other 
things, the composition of which I have 
never been able to fathom. This is mixed 
up into a sort of pudding, put into short 
lengths of bamboo, and roasted. When 
cooked the bamboo covering is split off 
with a knife, leaving nothing but a thin 
coating of the inside of the bamboo no 
67 



©DDs anD BnDs trom ipagoOa XaiiD 

thicker than a sheet of tissue paper. This 
is peeled off just as at home one peels off a 
banana skin, and the cooked rice inside is 
eaten with great relish. 

The music one hears at these pwaes cer- 
tainly deserves a little notice. Gongs, 
drums, and a kind of horn, together with 
cymbals and clappers — the last made out of 
split bamboo — are the chief instruments, and 
if they do not produce melodious sounds 
when judged by our ideals, they yet make a 
great deal of noise. To use a Wall Street 
expression, if Burman music is short on qual- 
ity, it is at least long on quantity ; in fact, 
the noise sometimes degenerates into a din 
in which the man with the gong seems to 
try and drown the sound of the horn and 
the musician behind the latter holds his 
own so well that the notes are simply 
ear-splitting. 

One instrument is unique. It is com- 
posed of a frame, richly carved and orna- 
mented, round, and about six feet across. 
This is placed upon the ground, the musi- 
cian taking his place in the middle. Around 
the inside of this frame are arranged a num- 
ber of gongs of different sizes and tones and 
they are struck with two sticks, one in each 
hand of the performer. It looks very funny 
68 



JCverB*Dai2 Stgbts anD Sounds 

to see a man, as a friend of mine said, 
"sitting inside liis instrument," pounding 
away as fast as ever he can, twisting and 
turning to get at his gongs. 

The Shans often have a number of gongs 
hung upon a bamboo and as each gong has 
a different tone a chord is produced when 
they are all struck together which is often 
very pleasant. But it is monotonous in the 
extreme ; for two or three boys will strike 
and strike and strike again, giving out the 
same notes each time, and keep this up for 
hours, yet they never seem to tire of the 
music. 

I have never seen a country, not even 
Japan, where street parades are so beauti- 
ful as in Burma. The air is so clear, and 
the sunshine is so bright that this of itself 
lends a charm to beautiful colors. Long 
strings of girls walking in single file, with 
baskets containing fruit done up in banana 
leaves upon their heads, form a pretty pic- 
ture indeed. The jackets are almost always 
of white linen and the dresses of silk, pink 
or red usually, sometimes yellow ; the jet 
black hair and showy silk handkerchiefs 
around their necks form a picture that 
would send an artist raving with delight. 

At the Water Feast these processions are 

69 



^^t>e anD JBnt>6 txom iPagoDa XanD 

especially beautiful. Then the girls and 
boys rise early, go to the river and fill their 
chatties, or bowls, with water, and after form- 
ing into line walk to the pagodas where 
they throw water over the idols. Later on 
they throw water over each other and a 
great amount of fun results. 

The Burmans do not as a rule make good 
household servants and therefore most of 
the " help," as we would say at home, are 
natives of India. First and foremost comes 
the white-robed, turbaned Madrassi. He 
is a " boy " if he has passed his seventieth 
birthday. His knowledge of colloquial Eng- 
lish is wonderful, and if a person's pocket- 
book is only long enough to stand the strain, 
he makes a grand servant. 

For generations his ancestors have been 
servants and this has gone on so long that 
he actually seems to have inherited a spe- 
cial aptness to cook, and wait on table, and 
— to cheat ; for without exception he is the 
greatest pilferer yet evolved. Butter and 
tea and coffee and sugar evaporate in the 
most remarkable manner. A joint comes 
upon the table for dinner, a cut or two are 
taken from it and the balance disappears 
without leaving a trace. If " master " 
drinks (he always does in Burma if he is 
70 



jevergs^Oais SiQbts anD SounOs 

not a missionary), brandy and whisky bot- 
tles empty themselves mysteriously leav- 
ing, like the celebrated one in ** Pickwick 
Papers,'* *' nothing but the cork and the 
smell '* ; and goods for which an anna was 
paid in bazaar, through the simple process 
of carrying them thence to the cook-house, 
gain so greatly in value that they are 
charged ** missus *' two annas. 

Still, if, as I said before, one's purse can 
stand it, the Madrassi makes an incom- 
parable servant. He revels in big dinners, 
and will grudge no pains in making one a 
success ; he will spend hours and hours 
decorating cakes or making ** fancy fixin's " 
and the air with which a Madrassi butler 
waits upon table would put the most pom- 
pous English servant in the shade. 

The dhohie is also an importation from 
India. He wears out clothes and inci- 
dentally washes them. In order to see 
him at his work of destruction it is neces- 
sary to go to the river's bank or the edge 
of a tank. Here the big bundle of dirty 
clothes is thrown upon the ground, and 
several garments selected to commence 
operations with. He twists them into a 
sort of rope and wades into the river till the 
water reaches his knees. Next he dips 
71 



©DDs anD :i6nD6 ttom pagoDa XanD 

them in the river till they are thoroughly 
soaked. Near-by is a large, flat stone partly 
embedded in the sand, or the trunk of an 
old tree, the top of which has become pol- 
ished by previous exertions on his part. 
Into the water again goes the rope of clothes, 
then he swings it above his head and brings 
it down, swash, upon the stone with all his 
might. He gives a queer little grunt every 
time, a sort of vicarious offering, for the 
clothes would groan if they only could. 
Then over his head go the clothes again, 
down they come once more, swash, swash, 
swash ! He pauses every once in a while 
just long enough to give them another soak- 
ing and shift his grip a little, then once more 
he starts and thud, thud, thud, go the 
clothes till they are clean — and one stage 
nearer the rag-bag. 

The hheestie also hails from the farther 
side of the Bay of Bengal. He is the 
water-carrier, and can be seen plodding 
slowly along with a goatskin full of water 
upon his back. He makes one think of 
Bible pictures as he labors past, but this 
sort of hheestie is doomed ; the goatskin 
is passing away, before what? You would 
guess a long time and then not get it right 
for you would probably not think it likely 
72 



JBvcvQ^^^^ SiQbta anD Sounds 

that Mr. Rockefeller is slowly but surely 
changing a custom older than the very 
Bible itself, but it is a fact. The goatskin 
is disappearing before the tin can, and now 
the water-carrier usually brings you water 
not as he used to in a skin sack, but over 
his shoulder now is a coolie stick and at 
either end of this stick hangs a large can 
which, when it left America, was full of 
Standard oil. In fact, these cans have be- 
come a standard for judging a great many 
things in Burma, and are often used to 
measure grain and oil and other things. 

The syce must not be left unmentioned 
or unnoticed when talking of servants. 
He too, is a native of India. His work is 
to attend to the pony ; he is, in fact, the 
groom, and is one of the most remarkable 
runners you would meet with during a 
journey around the entire world. After he 
has saddled his master's pony and helped 
the *' sahib *' to mount, he trots along be- 
hind the horse ready, at a moment's notice, 
to render assistance if needed, or be at the 
bridle the moment the rein is drawn. These 
men will run for great distances, and not 
only that, but they often carry the polo 
stick or the tennis racket which the rider 
wishes to use at the end of his ride. 
73 



©DOS anD l£ni>e from iPagoDa XanD 

The barber, usually a Mohammedan, plies 
his trade in the open street. A fellow-be- 
liever wishing his head shaved or his beard 
trimmed takes his seat upon the ground and 
the barber sits before him. Unmindful of 
the crowds passing and repassing, he takes 
a few drops of water from a little brass pot 
and dampens the head of his customer — his 
victim, I had almost written ; then without 
any soap, he commences to scrape, and he 
works away till his job is finished in a most 
workmanlike style. He is rewarded with a 
few copper pieces ; his customer marches 
off and he is ready for ** Next ! " 

A *' box wallah," or in plain English a 
hawker or pedler, often puts in an appear- 
ance with silks, silver trinkets, embroider- 
ies, and curios for sale. One must learn 
how to buy from him, however. It is a 
work of art and patience as well to make 
a purchase. After he has spread his silks 
over the veranda floor, and you, or rather 
your wife, has made her selection, she asks 
the price. .He names a sum at least twice, 
more often thrice, what he would be will- 
ing to sell it for, and then comes a great 
deal of chaffering and beating down. Sup- 
pose, for example, he says twelve rupees. 
You laugh at him and ask him what the 
74 



JBvctBsOaB SiQbts anD Sounds 

" proper " price is, not the ** first asking " 
price, but he assures you that he gave 
eleven rupees and a half, and only expects 
to make one single, solitary eight-anna 
piece upon the transaction. You know that 
he is telling a lie and laugh his story to 
scorn, so he looks at your wife and says, 
** What will missus give? Missus make 
proper price." ** Four rupees," says your 
better half promptly. Now it is the 
hawker's turn to laugh and he folds up his 
goods as though that ended the bargaining, 
but you will notice that he does not put 
them back into his box or bundle. After a 
great deal of talk in which he assures you 
that he is a very poor man and that you are 
very rich and great, and will not miss a 
rupee or two, he comes down a little in his 
price, a rupee at a time, each time that he 
lowers his price protesting that he is losing 
money, but your wife remains firm. Finally 
in apparent desperation he draws a rupee 
from his pocket and offers to gamble. ** You 
toss me whether you pay five rupees or 
seven," he says. Of course, as you are a 
missionary, you shake your head at this ; 
then he holds up the piece of silk, shakes 
it, shows you how beautiful it is, assures 
you again that he is a very poor man and 
75 



®DD0 anO BnDs ttom ipagoOa XanD 

did not make a rupee in profit the day be- 
fore, then he tosses it toward you and says : 
**ril sell it for six." Your wife may per- 
haps raise her price eight annas (half a ru- 
pee) and with many groans he says that 
he will let it go for five and to end the 
chaffering you give in. 

He swears solemnly that you have given 
him four rupees less than he paid for it and 
that the only hope he has of making up his 
loss is by asking ** plenty big prices" at 
every other house at which he will call that 
day, but if you tell him that you do not 
wish to cheat him and offer to give the 
goods back to him if he will return your 
money he shakes his head and says he likes 
to be cheated ; that is his way of doing 
business. 

These box wallahs have one peculiar 
superstition. When they start out upon 
their rounds in the morning they must 
either make a sale in the first house in 
which they open their pack, or have bad 
luck throughout the entire day, and rather 
than make no sale they are willing to sell 
an article — preferably an inexpensive one 
in this case — at a real loss, and so keep 
their good luck. 

The ** coffee wallah " is another common 
76 



Bven2s:&ai8 Sifibts anD SounDa 

sight upon the street. Like the barber, he 
is usually a follower of the prophet and 
turns his face toward Mecca and bows pro- 
foundly each night when the muezzin 
mounts the minaret of the mosque and 
calls the faithful to their prayers. 

He carries a coolie stick over his shoulder 
at one end of which is a hanging tray cov- 
ered with cups and saucers. This is bal- 
anced at the other end by a basket in which 
is a large iron chattie or cooking-pot full of 
hot coffee, with a charcoal fire burning 
beneath. He walks slowly through bazaar 
or the principal streets, ready at a moment's 
notice to sit upon the ground and dish out a 
cup of coffee to a customer. 

His great rival in business is the Chinese 
chow chow man. The Celestial carries a 
much more complicated trading outfit, how- 
ever. At each end of a bamboo coolie stick 
is a sort of table, or rather number of tables, 
one beneath the other, something like a set 
of shelves joined at the corners. Upon 
each are a number of dishes containing 
mysterious looking chow. It would be a 
very difficult matter to guess of what each 
dish is composed, perhaps a hopeless task, 
but his customers have no fear apparently ; 
they sit upon the ground and eat, using the 



®DD0 anD ;6nO0 trom iPagoDa XanD 

chop sticks belonging to the outfit and which 
are at each customer's service, without any 
qualms either of conscience or stomach. 
No wonder that almost every native has 
dyspepsia ; the only wonder is that any are 
free, and as a matter of fact the number is 
very small. 

Once in a while an Indian snake-charmer 
puts in an appearance with his shallow 
baskets full of cobras, his pipe, and his 
snake-stone. He is usually a great fraud. 
The fangs have all been drawn from his 
snakes so that they are harmless, and any- 
body could handle them with impunity. 
He plays upon his pipe and makes them 
** dance," as he calls it, or in other words 
sway back and forth while his flute squeaks 
a discordant noise called by courtesy a tune. 

He finally handles one snake which turns 
upon him and is supposed to bite his hand. 
He pretends to suffer great agony as well as 
fear. He grasps the hand bitten, wrings it, 
groans aloud, and twists as though he had 
the colic. Between groans and grunts he 
opens a very dirty cotton bag and from it 
takes a small flat stone. This stone cures 
the wound the snake did not make, as an 
Irishman might put it. He spits upon one 
side of the stone and presses it to the place 
7^ 



Bvcri2*&ai2 QiQbte anD Sounds 

where the cobra is supposed to have stung 
him. The effect is instantaneous ; the 
groans cease, his twisting also stops, and in 
a few minutes, the saliva having dried, the 
stone falls from his hand and lo, no wound 
is there, not even a mark, nothing but dirt, 
although it must be confessed there is a 
good deal of that. 

The crowd gathered around to witness 
the performance, however, sometimes takes 
the pantomime for solid truth and is much 
impressed. Scores of children stand and 
gape and wonder, with a little fear too, on 
their faces ; even the babies tied to the 
backs of their big sisters seem to enter into 
the wonder. Poor little urchins, some of 
the elder children that carry them are not 
much more than babies themselves or very 
much larger than their charges, and it is 
wonderful how many babies there are ; for 
almost every woman's back is decorated in 
the same manner. 

When a Burman woman wants to carry 
her child, she bends forward till her back 
is at right angles with the rest of her body ; 
then upon it she puts her child. A shawl 
is thrown over the baby and the ends 
brought in front of the mother's chest, over 
one arm, and under the other ; then the 

79 



©OD0 anD BnOs trom iPagoDa 3LanD 

woman straightens up and her baby is fast 
upon her back, with nothing visible but a 
small head with coal black hair and eyes of 
the same color. The woman works, sits 
down, gets up, chats, smokes, cooks, and 
eats, and the baby's head wobbles and 
shakes as though it would come off, but it 
is never hurt apparently and looks quite 
happy in spite of the shaking. 

Death visits all countries, and is no more 
a respecter of persons in Burma than in 
America, and the funeral procession is one 
of the most unique sights one sees in the 
land of the pagoda. The cofifin is always 
highly decorated. It is covered with bright- 
colored paper, usually with gilt braid tacked 
along the edges, and often has pictures, 
brightly colored, pasted upon the sides and 
lid. The coffm is made in the street before 
the house where the dead body lies in full 
view of every passer-by. It is made of 
rough boards nailed together, often with 
wide gaps between, but the bright-colored 
paper or cloth covers up all these defects, 
and when finished it is, to Burman eyes at 
least, a thing of beauty. 

In order to convey it to the cemetery it 
is placed upon a bier made of bamboos, 
gaily decorated with flags, streamers, silk 
80 



}6veri2*&ai2 Siflbts anD Sounds 

handkerchiefs, and gaudy paper panels 
upon which figures of men, women, and 
nats have been drawn. These biers are 
often a dozen feet high and the coffin is 
perched several feet above the shoulders of 
the men carrying it. Sometimes the bier is 
built upon a sort of car and is drawn to the 
cemetery by scores of men and women, 
friends of the dead. 

The head of the procession is always 
formed by coolies, walking two and two, 
each couple bearing between them a bam- 
boo pole upon which is hung a large number 
of presents, jackets, blankets, robes, fans, 
food, mats, etc. These are for the priests 
and are carried to the different monasteries 
after the ceremonies are over. 

Next comes a band of musicians with 
horns, fifes, gongs, and clappers making a 
tremendous din ; then comes the procession 
proper, men, women, and children all mixed 
up without any order ; laughing, shouting, 
and joking, with no more solemnity than 
though they were on their way to the 
circus. 

Seven days afterward there is a great 

commotion in the house from which the 

funeral started. Fires are made in the 

street and great pans of food are cooked 

F 8i 



©DOS anD J6nDs from iPagoDa XanO 

over them. This is the funeral feast, a 
large part of it going to the monasteries, 
but the neighbors and beggars, of course, 
come in for their share of the good things. 
If the relatives of the dead man should omit 
holding this feast, the ghost of the departed 
would, without any doubt whatever, return 
to its old home and haunt it and his old 
companions as well. 

Except in the larger cities where they are 
under the charge of the municipality and 
therefore have an Englishman at the head, 
the Burman cemetery is nothing more than 
a piece of waste land. Vegetation is very 
dense in Burma, and after the rains the 
bushes which have grown luxuriantly dur- 
ing the wet weather are sometimes chopped 
down, sometimes not, but that is the extent 
of the work expended on it ; nothing is 
done to keep it in order and I know no 
more desolate sight in the wide world than 
these broken pieces of ground littered with 
the fragments of old biers which have been 
thrown upon the graves and left to rot and 
decay. The tattered ends of gaudy paper, 
the ends of bamboos, and around all the 
coarse grass and ugly weeds — the most 
dismal sight in all Burma. On the Shan 
hills I have seen graves which have been 
82 



)6vcri2sDai2 Sights anD Sounds 

torn open by dogs, the flimsy coffins broken, 
and the dead bodies eaten. My wife and 
myself once disturbed a number of dogs at 
such a ghastly repast, and one, as it darted 
away towards the village carried a skull in 
its mouth to feast upon afterwards. 

The English cemetery presents one very 
strange sight — that is, strange to a new- 
comer, though one soon gets used to it- 
graves already dug and waiting for their 
occupants. In a tropical country the fune- 
ral must necessarily follow very quickly 
after death. In case a cholera epidemic 
pays the city a visit — unfortunately not a 
rare occurrence — there is occasion for even 
more speedy interment, but under ordinary 
circumstances should a person die during 
the morning he is buried at sunset and, 
should he die during the night, he is carried 
to his last home at sunrise and so the grave 
ready-dug is a necessity. 

I have been much struck by the fact that, 
as the old saying has it, ** prejudices die 
hard." Take the Bhamo cemetery, for 
example. The center is reserved for the 
*' Church of England," the Episcopalians, 
as we would call them in America, mem- 
bers of the Established Church ; but if a 
man during life has been a dissenter he is 
85 



Ot>t>0 ant) lBnt)S from iPasoDa XanD 

buried "alongside the wall " in the worst 
part of the cemetery. The first funeral I 
witnessed in Bhamo was that of an Ameri- 
can miner who had come to Burma hunting 
gold. He was buried among the dissenters 
and the native Christians, members of the 
Baptist church, and a few months ago an 
English soldier was laid away near the 
miner. This man was not buried near his 
comrades because in life they had ** fol- 
lowed the big drum " to parade service and 
listened to prayers read by the chaplain in 
** church,'* while he, poor fellow, had gone 
to ** chapel" and listened to a Methodist 
minister, therefore he was not counted 
worthy of filling a grave in " consecrated " 
ground. This is an old English custom now 
happily obsolete, I believe, in England, 
where broader and more charitable views 
have prevailed over old-time prejudices, 
but it still flourishes in at least one city in 
Burma if not in others. 

Among the large number of natives of 
India that live in Burma are many Moham- 
medans. There is a mosque in every large 
city and near it a raised platform or minaret 
which the muezzin ascends at certain hours 
to call ** the faithful " to prayers. I once 
saw a minaret which was made from the 
84 



}8veri2*Dai2 Sigbts ant) SounOe 

trunk of an old tree, the platform at the top 
being reached by a small ladder made of 
bamboo, which leaned against the trunk. 
Each evening at sunset we saw the priest 
mount this platform ; then, with his opened 
hands raised, he called in a peculiar, high- 
pitched tone which could be heard for a 
wonderfully long distance. 

Upon hearing the summons every good 
Mohammedan ceases his work, spreads his 
mat, turns his face toward Mecca, and prays. 
Should he be in his shop, in bazaar, or upon 
the street, it makes but little difference. 
He stands, raises his hands, bows, kneels, 
and goes through the prescribed formula in 
as unconcerned a fashion as though he were 
alone in his house. 

The Mohammedan priest calling his fol- 
lowers to prayer has a counterpart among 
the Burmans. Every night at dusk the 
Buddhist priests enter the idol-houses and 
chant prayers before the idols. Just before 
this happens a man — almost always an old 
one, who wishes to gain the reputation of 
being a very holy personage — takes a three- 
cornered gong in one hand and a mallet or 
short, heavy piece of wood, in the other, 
and marches slowly along the principal 
streets, striking the gong as he goes. Upon 

85 



(^DDd anD iBnDa trom iPagoDa XanD 

this signal the old women leave their houses, 
bearing glasses or cups of flowers upon 
their heads, and rosary in hand, make their 
way to the idol-houses, where they devoutly 
sit behind the priests, their hands clasped 
before their faces in adoration, earning merit 
which will help to atone for the sins com- 
mitted during the day. One very rarely 
sees any but very old women going thus 
evening by evening to the idol-houses. 
The younger people practically never attend 
save upon some special occasion such as 
feasts or when they wish to get something, 
when they will go with offerings night after 
night and listen to the yellow-robed, shaven 
priests. After the ceremony is over — it 
does not last very long — the old women 
return to their homes to gossip and smoke. 
One strange sound often heard at night 
is singing, or, rather, chanting. In the old 
days there were, of course, no lamp-posts 
in the cities ; in fact, there are none now 
except in the towns under a municipal 
government, so that, except on moonlight 
nights, the streets were pitch dark soon 
after sunset. This afforded an excellent 
opportunity for barefooted thieves to stalk 
unwary passengers, so there was a law that 
after a certain time at night every person 
86 



jBvcvQ^tfdi^ Sigbts anD Sounds 

abroad must sing at the top of his voice and 
thus show he was an honest citizen, not 
afraid of anybody's knowing his where- 
abouts and, although now in the cities lamps 
line the streets, the old custom has not en- 
tirely fallen into disuse, and one often hears 
at night a man passing along the street 
singing at the very top of his voice. 

One of the commonest sights is that of 
persons kindly carrying a search-warrant 
through a friend's hair. The patient sits 
in the sunlight so that the operator can see 
to do his work well, lets down his or her 
hair, and the search commences. The ver- 
min found are sometimes not killed — such 
an act would be against Buddhist law — but 
are dropped upon the ground and allowed 
to crawl away. 

The Burmans are not dirty. They are, I 
think, the cleanest of Orientals. They 
bathe daily and often wash their clothes, 
but everybody, men and women, wear long 
hair and, as they always bathe in cold 
water, it is impossible to keep their heads 
free from vermin. 

Among the lower classes — the coolies, 
for instance — body vermin are very com- 
mon, so that during a jungle trip, when the 
caravan halts for a rest, the coolies have a 

87 



®DD0 anD BnDs trom pagoDa UanD 

habit of pulling off their jackets to hunt 
through the seams. During our first jungle 
trip, when my wife saw the coolie who 
carried our bed engaged in this necessary 
occupation she said "it made her shiver,'* 
and it must be acknowledged it does not 
look nice, but strange to say, although we 
took many trips the first two years we were 
in Burma and, although my work carries 
me into all sorts of houses and all sorts of 
places, clean and dirty, yet in fourteen 
years I have never found vermin upon my 
clothes. They seem to be discriminating. 

The staple food of the Burman is rice. 
A rice field, or paddy field as it is usually 
called in Anglo-Indian colloquial, is a very 
different affair from a wheat field at home. 
There are two kinds of fields, and two kinds 
of rice are raised, the highland and the low- 
land, the former being much harder and 
less nutritious than the latter. 

When a Kachin wishes to make a rice 
field he selects a mountainside, and during 
the dry season sets fire to the jungle cover- 
ing it, the ashes from the burnt trees being 
the only dressing upon it. Then upon the 
side of the hill, often almost as steep as the 
side of a house, he sows his paddy, which 
in due time is reaped and the jungle allowed 



Everi2*Dai2 Slgbts anD Sounds 

to grow again. Next year he selects an- 
other site, and thus he goes on, burning 
and planting, planting and burning, till in 
the course of a few years the first field has 
become covered once more with trees all 
ready to be burnt again. It would be dif- 
ficult to conceive a more wasteful method, 
but who cares? Not the Kachin, that is 
certain. The territory is wide, the hillsides 
numberless, and the jungle dense. Besides, 
" the easiest way is always the best way " 
in the East. 

Lowland rice growing among the Bur- 
mans is, however, a very different affair. 
Rice demands a large amount of moisture ; 
in fact, it is planted and sprouts in mud. 
The field is divided and subdivided into 
numberless smaller fields, each separated 
from its neighbor by raised banks or ridges 
of earth. These banks are made for the 
purpose of holding the water with which 
each field is flooded. 

The Burman plow is a primitive affair. 
In Upper Burma it is usually nothing more 
than a sharp, heavy stick with one handle, 
and does little more than scratch the ground 
as it is dragged along by a couple of powerful 
buffaloes. This is hard, heavy work, as the 
animals and the man behind them some- 

89 



©ODs anD iBn^B from iPagoDa XanO 

times sink at every step almost up to their 
knees in mud. But at last the plowing is 
finished and the seed is sown. Soon the 
green stalks of the paddy plant appear, 
and then comes another laborious task, 
for each plant is pulled up by the roots, 
tied into bundles, and then transplanted 
from the "nursery" into the big, wide 
field. Imagine working in a paddy field all 
day long up to one's knees in mud and 
water, with a fierce tropical sun beating 
down and the smell from water, mud, and 
manure rising in clouds. Imagine this and 
then you will not be surprised to hear that 
the men and women that do this work get 
fever and rheumatism. 

Birds play havoc with the ripening grain, 
and many are the devices used to scare the 
marauders off. The scarecrow, of course, 
is one. Strings are also stretched across 
the fields, and pieces of bamboo and rags 
tied to them flutter in the wind. Another 
favorite way, especially among the Shans, 
is to split bamboos for almost their entire 
length. The solid end is buried in the 
ground, several bamboos being planted in 
different parts of the field, and to the split 
end of each, near the top, a string is fas- 
tened and carried across the field to a hut 
90 



J6vcrB*Dai2 Sigbts anD SounOs 

in which small boys take their station. 
They draw these strings, pulling the split 
ends of the bamboo far apart, then letting 
go the string suddenly, the two sides of the 
bamboo come together with a report loud 
enough to frighten away any bird with 
average nerves. As each string in turn is 
pulled it sometimes sounds almost like a 
volley of small arms. 

Instead of these wooden clappers the 
boys are sometimes armed with bows made 
out of bamboo, but instead of shooting 
arrows they use small round pellets made 
of clay baked in the sun till they are as 
hard as stone. Boys become wonderfully 
expert with these weapons, and woe betide 
the bird that does not fly when they make 
their appearance. 

After the paddy has been reaped, 
threshed, and ground it is brought into the 
cities as rice and sold. Vast quantities of 
paddy also go to the rice mills of Rangoon, 
where it is prepared, graded, and exported 
to Europe and Egypt. 

One part of the process of turning paddy 
into rice is very interesting. The husks 
are pounded off the paddy, and this breaks 
a large number of the grains, so that some 
are large and some but small pieces of ker- 
91 



©DD6 anD BnDs from iPagoOa XanD 

nels. The separating of the whole from 
the broken rice is usually done by girls and 
women. A large flat tray is used, and sev- 
eral handfuls of the mixed grain are placed 
upon it ; the tray is round with a raised 
edge, is made of bamboo, and is called a 
san hyah. Several handfuls of the mixed 
grain are placed upon it, and then the girl 
takes it in both hands and tosses the rice 
in the air, skilfully catching it upon the 
tray again as it falls and moving it so that 
the large, heavy grains fall to one side 
and the broken pieces upon the other. 
Then with a dexterous turn of her wrist 
she tosses the good rice into a basket at 
her side and throws the broken grains upon 
a large mat at her feet. 

Some of the animals of Burma are cer- 
tainly worthy of a place in this chapter, 
and first and foremost comes the pariah, 
usually known as the **pi" dog. A trav- 
eler once said that the **pi" dog had all 
the faults and failings of his race and none 
of the good ones to balance the account. 
He receives no ** bringing up " as does his 
relative in America, but from the time his 
eyes are opened he has to learn to run and 
dodge stones, and he has to learn too, 
almost as soon to forage for himself, for 
92 



although his mother and his brothers and 
sisters nominally belong to the person liv- 
ing in the house they claim as home, that 
person does not consider it his duty to pro- 
vide food for him. If the dog of highest 
degree in America had to live under similar 
conditions he would speedily degenerate into 
the snapping, snarling, ugly-tempered, and 
yet withal cowardly brute, called a ** pi." 

The cheekiest, most impudent, and yet 
the smartest animal that walks, runs, 
crawls, or flies, is the Burman crow. As 
fearless as the "pi" is cowardly, and as 
smart as the dog is dull, the crow is one of 
the greatest pests in Burma. He is every- 
where. He steals a livelihood, and yet 
does it in such a cool, impudent manner 
that one has to admire him, although he is 
often the cause of a great amount of bad 
temper and even bad language. 

The crow will steal the breakfast from 
the plate as the boy is carrying it from the 
cook-house to the dining-room ; he will 
boldly fly off with a chop from the dining- 
room table, or steal a cake or a crust from 
the baby's hand as it sits on the ground. 
The man that, like Pharaoh's baker of old, 
carries baskets of bread upon his head is 
obliged to cover his basket with a cloth or 
93 



©DDs anD 36nD0 from ipago^a Xan& 

he would have no wares to sell in a very 
few minutes after leaving his house. I 
have seen a crow knock the lid off a pot 
and steal potatoes which were cooking in 
it over the fire, and if crows were only 
strong enough they would steal the tradi- 
tional red-hot stove and not turn a feather ; 
of that I am confident. 

A few weeks ago the cook placed a silver 
spoon on the dining-room table and went 
into the kitchen ; a moment after he came 
running in and cried out that a crow had 
flown away with it. Sure enough there 
sat a crow upon the top of a jack-fruit tree 
with something shining in his mouth, and 
after he had been pelted and driven from 
tree to tree in the compound by a squad of 
schoolboys, he dropped his prize and one 
of the boys brought the teaspoon triumph- 
antly to my wife. 

Crows are wise too. For example, see 
that dog eating a bone on the veranda? He 
is gnawing away very contentedly, but 
gives a growl and lifts his head threaten- 
ingly as a crow alights upon the railing, 
and turning his head very much to one 
side gives a loud, long, deep caw. The 
dog knows full well that his bone is in 
danger. He has lost many a sweet morsel 
94 



B\>cr^=Dai3 QiQhte anD Sounds 

and tidbit ere this, so he growls more 
angrily than ever as a second crow joins 
the first upon the railing, turns his head to 
one side with a sly look, and gives a deep 
croak as his friend had done. 

Now comes an exhibition of team play on 
the part of the two crows. One alone could 
not possibly get the bone away from its 
owner, but the two can do it easily, and 
although the dog has often been fooled be- 
fore in exactly the same way, he falls a 
victim to the wiles of his enemies as easily 
as when first the trick was played at his 
expense. 

Crow number one continues to sit upon 
the veranda railing and give a croak or two 
of approval as his friend flies behind the dog 
and begins to peck at him. The dog growls 
and shows his teeth but that does not worry 
his tormentor in the least ; crow number 
two continues to deliver his pecks on the 
dog's back and his companion continues his 
approving croaks till dog-nature can stand 
it no longer and whirling around he attacks 
his tormentor in fury. Here is the oppor- 
tunity waited-for on the part of crow num- 
ber one ; he swoops upon the bone from 
his perch on the railing, at the same time 
giving a final triumphant croak, and flies 
95 



Qt>t>6 ano JBnt>6 from ipaeo&a 3Lan& 

away with the bone in his beak to the top 
of a tree, whither he is followed by crow 
number two who has, of course, easily made 
his escape from the dog, and both fight 
for possession of their booty, while their 
victim howls, barks, and snaps in unavail- 
ing anger. 

But although crows are so smart they can 
be easily deceived too. When a Burman 
wishes to set out a load of fish in the sun 
to dry he takes a make-believe bow with 
an arrow tied to the string and points the 
end toward the mat upon which his fish 
are drying, and the crows, thinking it is a 
trap and the fish merely a great bait, will 
give it the widest possible berth — the fish 
are as safe from them as though they were 
locked up in an iron, burglar-proof safe. 
Sometimes the fisherman ties some strings 
across and across, a few inches above the 
mat, leaving often a loop to dangle in the 
air ; this plan is just as effectual as the bow 
and arrow. 

The Burmans have a saying, "The crow 
is a thief, the hawk is a highwayman, but 
the vulture is a ' su daw gaung^ " (a very 
virtuous person, a saint, in fact). The vul- 
ture gets his good character from the fact 
that he never takes life, but feeds entirely 

96 



JBvcc^tibsi^ SiQbte anD Sounds 

upon dead animals, while the crow and the 
hawk do not hesitate to kill anything they 
can tackle successfully. 

Still, although the crow is a nuisance, 
there are two sides even to the crow ques- 
tion. Crows do the work that scavengers 
do at home, and it would be very unpleas- 
ant to live in a Burman town without them 
and the pariah, for the latter are scavengers 
too. Odds and ends of food, burnt rice that 
sticks to the edges and bottoms of cooking- 
pots, and the skins of vegetables and fruit 
are thrown in front of the houses or through 
cracks in the floor, as the easiest way of 
getting rid of them. Then the crow, ever 
on the watch, carries away what in a few 
hours would be a decaying, germ-breeding 
mass. Oh, yes, the crow, in spite of his 
exasperating voice and pilfering ways is 
a very useful member of Burmese life, a 
sort of blessing in disguise — sometimes very 
thoroughly disguised. 

Burma is the land of ants ; they just 
overrun the country. Red ants, black ants, 
and white ants ; big ants, little ants, and 
middling-sized ants. They live in the jun- 
gle, in the garden, and in the house ; in fact, 
to enumerate the places where they live 
would b-e like telling in what places the 
G 97 



©DD0 anD JBnDs trom iPagoDa 5LanO 

frogs were found during the plagues of 
Egypt. They climb up the posts, run over 
the floors, and climb up the legs of the 
tables. The meat-safe or cupboard has to 
be made with legs, one end of which must 
be set in small dishes full of water, other- 
wise the food would soon become black 
with ants. If one should kill a roach or a 
beetle at night, by morning myriads of these 
little creatures will have put in an appear- 
ance and will drag it across the floor, up 
posts a dozen feet or more high, and away 
into their storehouse, often situated under 
the roof between the joists of the floors. 
A few grains of sugar spilled from the table 
at meals call out swarms of ants, so many, 
in fact, that they form a regular army 
marching and counter-marching till they 
are ruthlessly swept away by a broom, and 
then some of them revenge themselves by 
running up the handle and biting the hand 
and arm of the man holding it. 

The white ants, however, are the most 
destructive. They will eat anything in a 
house except stones and cast-iron. A piece 
of pine wood left out of doors will be rid- 
dled in a few hours. They eat the bottoms 
of the house-posts which are set in the 
ground, and play havoc generally with wood 

98 



of almost every sort. It is because they do 
not eat teak as readily as some other kinds 
of lumber that makes that wood so useful 
in building purposes in Burma. 

When a house is built the bottoms of the 
posts are smeared with tar or earth oil, but 
even this does not preserve them indefin- 
itely. After a few years the white ants 
attack them, and when that happens it is 
the beginning of the end of that post. I 
have taken a knife or a screwdriver and 
broken a hole into the heart of a post as 
big around as myself, the wood cutting as 
easily as punk. Originally this post was 
as hard as oak but had become just honey- 
combed by these destructive little crea- 
tures. The damage they do is ridiculously 
out of proportion to their size, for although 
they are but little larger than the general 
run of ants the results of their work cost 
many thousands, nay, lacs of rupees in the 
course of a few years. 

Bees are very prevalent in Burma and 
some of them build their homes in most 
wonderful places. There is one kind of 
bee that builds its nest out of mud in any 
hole that strikes its fancy, and fills it with 
caterpillars for its grubs to feed upon after 
they are hatched. Holes in posts, or where 
99 

tore 



©DD0 anD JSnDB trom iPagoDa XanD 

a nail has been pulled out are favorite 
spots ; so are keyholes and the corners of 
rooms, but the very strangest place of all 
that I have yet seen was in my stethoscope. 
One morning I placed the instrument to my 
ears to listen to a patient's heart but to my 
surprise could not hear a sound. The 
stethoscope looked all right and yet I could 
not hear with it. Finally I blew down one 
side, or rather tried to blow, for I found it 
was plugged up, and a sliver of bamboo 
showed that an enterprising bee had spent 
the afternoon previous in filling up the 
tubes as nests for her little ones. Unfor- 
tunately for her the work was thrown away 
and she had to start over again in a new 
place, but it did not improve the stethoscope. 
When one first comes to Burma one is 
always interested in the gekkoes or house 
lizards. These little fellows run over walls 
and ceilings, sometimes as many as a dozen 
in a single room. They are welcome too, 
for they feed upon flies and other insects 
and thus help to keep them down. There 
is a kind of large lizard that lives in houses 
and which sometimes reaches a foot or two 
in length. It is called a tauc tau because 
its cry sounds very much like dauc tau ! 
or like a very affected person saying doctor ! 

100 



JBvcri3*&ai2 Sigbta anD SounO0 

A very funny story is told of one of our 
medical missionaries. He arrived in Ran- 
goon and was taken to the house of another 
missionary and at night was awakened by 
hearing the most blood-curdling moans. 
** Oh — oh — oh — dauc tau ! dauc tau ! dauc 
tau ! oh — — 1 " 

He thought it was a native who could 
speak but broken English, and so he sprang 
out of bed and shouted, ** Hullo ! here I am, 
what do you want ? What's the matter .? " 
Nobody answered, so thinking the sufferer 
had fainted he shouted for his host who 
came running out of his room in a fright. 
The doctor declared there was somebody in 
mortal agony that had called him and to- 
gether they made the rounds of the house, 
but of course in vain. 

The older missionary said the doctor must 
have had nightmare and advised him to 
sleep upon his side instead of on his back, 
but the latter declared he was positive he 
had heard groans after he woke up and 
was just as sure somebody had called 
** doctor." 

Suddenly through the silent house the 
groans rang out again. '* Oh — oh — oh, dauc 
tau! dauc tau!'* ** There," cried the doctor 
triumphantly, ** what do you make of that ? 

lOI 



®J)D0 anO BnD6 from iPaaoDa XanD 

Didn't I tell you there was a sick native 
around somewhere ? " 

The old missionary smited a little, led the 
way to a big fan that was fastened upon 
the wall by way of decoration, moved it a 
little, and away went a huge lizard. 

** There's your sick native, my boy," he 
said, pointing to the lizard, and although 
that happened years ago, the doctor has 
never heard the last of the story and 
probably never will. 



102 



®t)&0 an^ jenb0 of ^Travel 



Ill 

HE mighty river Irawadi, running 
through Pagoda Land from one end 
to the other, is the great water high- 
way of Burma, but I will leave the globe- 
trotter to describe steamer travel, as well 
as the railroad, for they two constitute 
about all he usually sees, and instead will 
say a little of journeys up narrow creeks, 
along byways in the plains, and over the 
jungle-covered mountains which run for 
several hundreds of miles through the 
country like a huge backbone. 

To tell the truth, it generally means very 
hard travel when passing over these hills 
and mountains of Burma; the **hill and 
water country," as the Shan pictur- 
esquely calls his home. The Indian gov- 
ernment has built magnificent roads in 
many directions ; some of the finest high- 
ways I have ever seen are in Burma, and 
great credit is due the Department of 
Public Works for the engineering skill dis- 
played in surveying and building them, but 
unfortunately one cannot always keep to 
105 



Qt>t>B anD BnD6 ttom iPaaoDa XanD 

these government roads with their easy 
grades, their mile-posts, and their rest-bun- 
galows, but has to strike out from them 
into the jungle where there is nothing but 
the old Burman paths, a very different 
proposition. 

One can travel along these great govern- 
ment highways with the minimum of dis- 
comfort. The grades are usually so easy 
that an ox-cart can travel over them. Mile- 
posts along the wayside tell the traveler 
what distance he has covered, and bunga- 
lows in which he can sleep will be found 
every dozen miles or so. 

Upon his arrival at a rest-bungalow the 
traveler is met at the compound gate by 
the janitor, or durwan, as he is termed, 
who is almost always a native of India. 
The durwan salaams and leads the way to 
the bungalow where one finds bedsteads, 
crockery, tables, chairs, and a punkah and 
a framed copy of rules — nothing is done in 
India without that. This bungalow and its 
furniture are kept up by the government 
for the accommodation of passengers, the 
vast majority of whom, of course, are offi- 
cials, but the non-official European is al- 
lowed to occupy the building and use the 
furniture upon payment of a nominal fee, 
io6 



®DD6 anD BnD6 ot XLxavcl 

usually one rupee for each person per day 
(thirty-three cents). 

In a land where the hotel, save in two or 
three of the largest cities, is practically un- 
known, and where one has to carry every- 
thing he needs upon a journey, it is hard 
to estimate how great a convenience these 
good roads and rest-bungalows are. The 
man who invented the easy chairs found in 
the latter deserves to be canonized, for he 
did a great deal more good than many of the 
saints who at present adorn the calendar. 

The usual mode of traveling over the 
hills of Burma is on pony-back. The Shan 
pony is a wonderful little animal and, so 
far as I know, for its size, is the pluckiest 
and hardiest sort of horse-flesh. He is small 
but wonderfully plucky and as sure-footed 
as a goat. I remember a small piebald be- 
longing to Mrs. Mix, of our mission. I nick- 
named him Barkis, because he was such a 
willing little beast, and although he had a 
heavy load to carry, he always kept in the 
van of the procession and would step along 
with a choppy, mincing gait, and keep it 
up too, where many another and larger 
pony would have given in. 

Poor little Barkis once "arrived at great 
trouble," as the Shans put it. Mrs. Mix, 
107 



®t>t>6 anD JEnDg trom iPagoDa XanD 

my wife, and myself were traveling through 
the jungle on our way to Mongnai, and as 
we had to cross over a wide plain and then 
climb a steep mountain, we thought we 
would save our ponies during the morning 
so that they would be able to help us later 
on when we came to scale the mountain. 
We were traveling along the top of a ridge 
beside which, every once in a while, lay 
a buffalo-wallow. These wallows are big 
holes filled with mud and water, in which 
buffaloes lie for hours with nothing but the 
tips of their horns and the ends of their 
noses showing above the mud. They are 
sometimes large enough to hold several 
animals at once. One of these wallows 
lay right across our path, and some thought- 
ful Shan had placed the trunk of a small 
tree over the chasm, forming a sort of rough 
bridge. For a bare-footed native, even 
though he might be loaded with two heavy 
baskets, it was as good and safe as Brook- 
lyn bridge, but to a white man with shoes 
on the round trunk looked formidable, es- 
pecially when one thought that a miisstep 
would send him floundering into a mud- 
hole the exact depth of which was mere 
conjecture. However, if we did not cross 
the bridge it would mean making a detour 
io8 



®0D5 anD lSr\t>6 of travel 

of almost half a mile, so we decided to risk 
it, and got to tlie further side in safety. 
Then we were treated to an impromptu 
circus act. The boys, with my wife's 
pony and my own, had gone around the 
mud-hole and were then about a quarter of 
a mile away, but the boy in charge of 
Barkis was much too lazy to follow their 
example. Instead he had started to lead 
the pony across the bridge, and just as we 
reached firm ground in safety, we looked 
back and saw boy and pony about one- 
third of their way across the bridge. It 
was, of course, impossible to turn back 
then and, as Mrs. Mix put it, " we just 
waited for the catastrophe." 

Barkis came along as easily and as dain- 
tily as though walking the tight rope was an 
everyday affair with him, but just as he got 
to the middle of the bridge a great horse-fly 
alighted upon him just forward of the girths. 
He stopped and bit at it, but that did not 
relieve him for, evidently forgetting where 
he was standing, he raised his hind foot to 
knock his tormentor off. I have no doubt 
he killed the fly, but the gymnastic feat 
was too much for him ; he overbalanced 
himself and fell from the bridge into the 
wallow with a stupendous splash. Alas, 
109 



©DDs atiD JBnt>s from pagoDa XanO 

poor Barkis ! Even as we watched he dis- 
appeared from view, and the next instant 
the very tip of a white nose appeared above 
the mud, and that was all. He floundered 
out upon the right side, however, shook him- 
self, and appeared quite composed and 
even dignified, although in one minute he 
had changed from a piebald to a red pony, 
for, save the tip of his nose before-men- 
tioned, he was as thoroughly covered with 
red mud as though he had been plastered. 
Bridle, saddle, everything was covered ; but 
what poor Mrs. Mix groaned about most 
was the fact that her Shan bag was tied to 
the saddle and was, of course, filled with 
mud, and her toothbrush lay right at the 
bottom. It was a melancholy affair in 
very truth. 

In any book upon Burma the word 
** zayat " frequently occurs. These zay- 
ats are really sleeping and resting-places 
for travelers, and are usually attached to 
Buddhist monasteries. They are religious 
buildings in so much that it is an act which 
gains merit to build one, and every Bud- 
dhist Lent the people " ascend the zayats," 
as the Shans term it, and often sleep there, 
this also being a meritorious act. 

They are usually the simplest building 
no 



: o 

, o 




®DD6 anD JBnt)0 ot travel 

possible. Imagine a floor raised a foot or 
two from the ground, with posts to support 
a roof, and you know what a zayat is. The 
floors and posts are usually of teak wood, 
although the former is sometimes made of 
split bamboo. The roof is either thatched 
or made of boards. Some zayats are highly 
decorated with carved work, some are mere 
huts, and they range all the way between. 

These zayats are the hotels of Burma, 
that is, if it is possible to have a hotel with- 
out host, servant, attendant, or furniture. 
A traveler arrives at one after marching all 
day ; the coolies throw his bed upon the 
floor; the cook takes the cooking utensils 
out of one coolie basket and the food out of 
another, then with the aid of a few stones 
he makes a cooking-place upon the ground 
near-by, so that the one building serves the 
purpose of kitchen, dining-room, parlor, and 
afterward bedroom as well. 

As before mentioned, these zayats are 
usually built in a monastery compound ; 
pagodas are near them, and upon every 
pagoda hangs a large number of little bells, 
and their ringing as the evening breeze 
passes by is sometimes the only notice, 
save the distant bark of a pariah dog in the 
village, that the traveler is near the end of 
III 



©DD0 anD JSnOs from iPagoDa XanD 

a long day's journey ; and many a time, 
weary, hungry, and thirsty these sweet- 
sounding little bells have heralded the news 
that we were near rest and food. To this 
very day I never hear the sound of pagoda 
bells without thinking of Doctor Luther, 
for many years a missionary in our society. 
He used to say that their tinkle was the 
sweetest and yet the saddest music in the 
world, for it meant that a darkened soul 
was groping after light. 

Before one commences a journey it is 
necessary to "call coolies." A traveler 
must take his bed with him, of course. 
This is usually a sort of comfortable, two 
or three inches thick, made of quilted cot- 
ton, and a blanket or two. These rolled 
up in a bundle and covered with a rubber 
sheet form half a burden, being carried at 
one end of a coolie stick. Food also has to 
be carried. Canned beef — bully beef as 
the Anglo-Indian has it — rice, of course, 
canned biscuits, canned vegetables — if you 
can afford such a luxury — a bottle of curry 
powder, a can or two of condensed milk, 
coffee, tea, etc. In short, everything likely 
to be required upon the journey must be 
carried, save, perhaps, paddy for the ponies 
and once in a while rice. The last two can 

112 



Ot>tf6 anD lEnDs ot travel 

sometimes, not always, be bought at vil- 
lages through which the traveler passes ; 
the bazaar gives fruit in season, oranges 
and bananas being the chief, and some- 
times too, one can get a few pumpkins and 
mustard leaves to help make curry. 

In order to carry this outfit coolies are 
necessary. Karens, Kachins, and other 
mountain people carry one basket upon 
their backs, with a strap going across the 
forehead, but the Shan uses a coolie stick, 
which is a stout bamboo about five feet 
long. This coolie stick, or kan as it is 
called, is passed through the handles of two 
baskets which balance, one at each end ; a 
bamboo peg is stuck in to hold them steadily 
when climbing up the steep mountain 
passes, and the coolie stick with its double 
burden is raised to the shoulder with one 
basket in front and one behind the bearer. 

The amount which constitutes '* cus- 
tom " for a Shan coolie to carry is ten viss^ 
a viss being a little more than three pounds, 
a load thus weighing about thirty-three 
pounds, and a coolie grumbles if he is ex- 
pected to carry more than this, and very 
often objects to going at all ; but when 
carrying his own goods when going to 
bazaar or to Lower Burma he will carry 
H 113 



(^DO0 anD jBnt>6 from ipagoDa XanD 

much more, a strong coolie shouldering as 
much as twenty viss, or more than sixty- 
six pounds, carrying this load, it must be 
remembered, over mountains rising from 
three to nearly seven thousand feet, and 
that too over trails which a white man finds 
it difficult to climb unloaded. The coolies 
from just over the borders of China, where 
there are a large number of Shan villages, 
will carry even more than this, their loads 
sometimes being twenty-three or twenty- 
four viss. 

I have many a time heard Doctor Gush- 
ing, our senior Shan missionary, say that 
he envied the coolie the ease with which 
he travels. He carries a chattie made of 
earthenware in which to cook his rice, he 
has a bag which looks like a footless hose, 
open at both ends, which he fills with raw 
rice and ties around his waist, he has one 
blanket to cover him at night, a little betel- 
nut to chew and a little tobacco to smoke, 
and a large sheet of coarse native paper to 
sleep on, the whole outfit weighing but a 
few pounds, and with this he starts off and 
marches all day long. At night he cooks 
his rice, spreads his paper bed upon the 
floor of a zayat, covers himself over head 
and ears with his blanket, and goes to 
114 



Ot>^s an& lBnt>6 of ^Travel 

sleep. Next morning he folds up his sheet 
of paper, sticks it in his girdle, ties his rice 
bag around his waist, slips his long sword 
under his arm, together with a small bag 
containing his betel-nut box and his pipe, 
shoulders his burden, and away he goes. 
He starts before or soon after sunrise and 
travels for several hours ; then he cooks his 
rice by the side of a stream, smokes and 
chews, and has a nap, then he starts again 
and walks till sunset. If he comes to a 
river which has to be forded he simply 
tucks his trousers up beneath his girdle and 
wades through ; of course, he has bare 
feet, and in a few minutes after he has 
gained the farther side his legs are dry. 
Even if the river is so deep that the water 
comes up to his waist it is a small matter. 
His trousers become soaked, it is true, but 
as they are made of thin cotton cloth they 
soon get dry and he does not mind a little 
thing like that ; he is used to it. 

Jungle travel, although at times very 
hard and fatiguing, is also very interesting. 
After the day's march to camp out in the 
open jungle is, to say the least, interesting. 
If one cannot reach a village and sleep in a 
zayat it is necessary to camp out. A spot 
near a stream is chosen, if possible beneath 
115 



©&D0 anD BnDa from iPasoba land 

a large tree. Little huts of brushwood are 
hastily built by the coolies, water is drawn 
and rice cooked, then green bamboos are 
thrown upon the fire. As these bamboos 
burn the sap between the joints boils, and 
after a while explodes with a report as loud 
as that of a Fourth of July cannon cracker. 
This is done to scare away any tiger that 
might happen to be prowling about. 

The firelight plays upon the great trees 
with their masses of deep black foliage ; 
off in the jungle one hears the hoarse, dis- 
cordant scream of the wild peacocks, and 
the call of the barking deer sounds from 
the deepest glades. All night long the fire 
burns and flickers, and never mind how 
often one may wake and look around there 
is sure to be a coolie or two moving about 
the fire ; I have sometimes wondered how 
they got enough sleep. 

Crossing rivers is oftentimes a great 
bother, especially if one starts out too soon 
after the rainy season, before the rivers 
and creeks have resumed their usual cold- 
weather proportions. Most of the streams 
have fords where one may cross upon 
horseback, but now and then it is neces- 
sary to swim the ponies from one bank to 
the other. At such places, if the road is a 
116 



®DD0 anD J£n^3 ot Zmvcl 

much-traveled one, there is a ferry and 
native boats, the ferryman carrying over 
passengers and goods for a few pice^ while 
the horses or oxen swim over. Sometimes, 
however, the ferryman is absent at bazaar 
or tending to some other business or asleep, 
making one think of Elijah's taunt to the 
priests of Baal, for certainly one can stand 
upon the far side of the river under such 
circumstances and shout and shout and 
shout with no better results than came to 
the priests on Carmel. Even the report of 
a revolver-shot fired in the air will not 
always be successful in arousing him ; then 
it is necessary for a coolie to swim across 
and commandeer the ferryman's boat, 
bringing it to our side, and then to ferry us 
over without the owner's aid. Sometimes 
the latter person arrives upon the scene just 
as we reach the end of our trip, in which 
case he demands toll just as though he 
had brought us over. He contends that the 
boat is his, that we ought to have waited 
a little longer — time is no object with a 
Shan, he cannot understand why the white 
man should always be in a hurry — and he 
is therefore entitled to his fee. This occa- 
sions a vast deal of discussion between the 
ferryman and our coolies, usually ending 
117 



©DD0 anD iBnDs from iPagoDa XanD 

in a compromise, part of the usual price 
being given liim, and we part with mutual 
grumblings. 

Sometimes, however, there is no ferry- 
boat to be had, and it is then necessary to 
cross upon a raft. This raft is nothing but 
a bundle of bamboos, not even an oar 
being in sight, nothing but bamboo poles, 
and the current is often quite swift. This 
condition of affairs sometimes gives rise to 
quite an exciting passage, but the bamboo 
is wonderfully buoyant, and the trip from 
bank to bank is usually made in perfect 
safety, though beds and bedding sometimes 
come to grief by getting a ducking during 
the passage. 

The baggage of officials is usually car- 
ried by pack-ponies or mules or by ele- 
phants. Often too, they take with them 
an escort of sepoys or native-of-India sol- 
diers, but judging from personal experience 
I should say that the escort is more bother 
than it is worth, the principal use of the 
sepoys being, apparently, to quarrel with 
the Burmans or Shans through whose coun- 
try they pass ; at the present time it is as 
safe to travel through Burma, so far as 
natives are concerned, as in America. 

The elephant is a wonderful beast and 
ii8 



©DD6 anD )Bn^0 ot Zvavcl 

carries a heavy load, but it is not nearly so 
tough as a pack-mule or pony and requires 
more looking after. There is a strange 
antipathy between elephants and ponies — 
the elephant scares the pony and the pony 
the elephant. I remember once while rid- 
ing through a thick jungle in the Southern 
Shan States that I suddenly almost rode 
into a big elephant that had been coming 
toward me but had been hidden by a turn 
in the path. He was loaded with trunks 
and boxes of different kinds belonging to 
the general commanding the district, who 
was upon a tour of inspection and had that 
day left the fort to which I was riding. 

I shouted a warning to the mahout or 
driver, but before he could do anything the 
elephant, thoroughly scared at my sudden 
appearance, whirled around faster than it 
seemed possible for so huge a beast to turn 
and darted off full speed through the jungle, 
bearing down brushwood and small trees 
as he ran and blazing his path by shedding 
boxes at every few yards. At least one 
case of wine reached a destination never 
intended for it, and I have often wondered 
what the general said that night when the 
elephant reached camp and he saw what 
condition his kit was in. 
119 



®J>Dj5 an^ lEnOa trom paooDa XanD 

In his way the Shan pack-bullock is as 
unique an animal as the Shan pony. He 
is strong and, if slow, covers a good many 
miles as a day's march and carries a heavy 
load. Salt, ngapiy manufactured goods from 
Germany and England, and American ker- 
osine oil go over the mountains to Shan 
country carried by oxen, and peanuts, rice, 
and other grain are brought into Burma by 
the same means. 

In the old days, during the rule of the 
Burman kings, several caravans traveled 
together and the drivers were armed to the 
teeth to protect themselves from highway- 
men and the savage tribes that infested the 
hills and gained a livelihood — a good one 
too — by robbing Shan caravans. The older 
drivers tell stories of regular battles, though 
these were probably very rare. The na- 
tive of Burma, of whatever race he might 
belong to, does not fight that way. He 
likes to ambush his enemy and shoot him 
from behind without bringing any undue 
risk or danger upon himself. 

In those days the owners of caravans 
had to pay taxes to every petty chief 
through whose territories they passed. The 
*Mord of the oxen," if he hailed from the 
Southern Shan States, usually reckoned 

120 



©000 anO BnD0 ot tltavel 

upon making three journeys a year. The 
first and part of the second paid for the 
taxes levied upon him during the year ; 
the balance of trip number two paid for the 
wear and tear of his cattle, etc., and the 
third was his profit. 

Now, however, since English rule has 
come, the dues have been done away with ; 
roads are much improved so that the wear 
and tear has been much reduced ; the 
highwaymen have been driven away and 
the fierce hill tribes awed into subjection, 
so that these are happy days for the Shan 
ox-owner, far different from those his father 
knew or he himself, for that matter, if he 
has been in business for twenty years, and 
he gains a substantial profit upon each trip 
instead of upon one only. 

The equipment of a pack-bullock is simple 
in the extreme. He carries a large basket 
upon either side. About one-third from the 
top of the basket is a hole upon each side 
and a strong stick is passed through them 
so that they hang upon either end. A 
couple of cushions are placed upon the back 
of the bullock and these prevent galling 
from both baskets and stick. A band of 
leather or woven rattan passes over the 
chest to keep the baskets from slipping off 

121 



©DDs anD BnOs from ipaooDa XanO 

when going up hill and a crupper serves 
the same purpose when going down hill, 
and that is all. But in spite of its simplicity 
it answers its purpose admirably and the 
baskets and their contents usually reach 
their destination in safety and without a 
tumble save when the oxen are frightened 
— they are easily driven into a panic — and 
when that happens they dash off into the 
jungle like the general's elephant and their 
burdens twist and speedily fall to the ground 
or are torn off by the branches of trees or 
underbrush. 

At night the caravan is collected. Two 
bullock-men approach an animal and, put- 
ting their shoulders beneath the ends of 
the stick which protrude a foot upon either 
side, lift the burden up an inch or two, at 
the same time unfastening the crupper. 
The bullock lowers its head and backs out, 
leaving its burden resting upon the men's 
shoulders. The baskets are lowered to the 
ground ; the two cushions, wet with sweat, 
are placed upon top of them to get dry, and 
the bullock wanders off into the jungle to 
get his supper. 

The halts are made at regular resting- 
places, where caravans have stopped from 
time immemorial. Here the ground is 

122 



©000 anD JSnDs ot travel 

studded with short, stout bamboo pegs, and 
at evening, when the bullocks return from 
their foraging, each one in turn is tied by a 
rope to one of these pegs to prevent his 
straying away during the night and thus 
furnishing a meal to a hungry tiger. The 
men make little booths or huts by sticking 
four sticks into the ground, tying cross 
pieces to them and covering the top with 
brushwood. They crawl into these shelters 
after lighting a big fire, at which one man 
keeps guard all night. 

There is one bad point about these ox 
caravans, however, and that is they some- 
times play havoc with jungle roads. It is 
custom to travel during the cold and hot 
seasons, as I think I have before mentioned, 
but sometimes the temptation to make an 
extra journey is too great to be resisted 
and the " lord of the oxen " decides to risk 
getting back before the rains begin and trav- 
eling is made impossible for some months. 
The result is that the caravan sometimes 
gets caught by the rains and has to travel 
over a road made soft as mush, with a mud- 
hole every few yards to vary the monotony. 
The oxen, heavily laden, go plodding on. 
At each step they make they sink over 
their hoofs in soft soil or mud. Ox after 
123 



©DDs anD BnD0 from iPagoDa XanD 

ox passes, each sinking a little deeper than 
the one he followed, till at last deep ruts 
are formed running across and across the 
road, from one side clear to the other, about 
a foot or eighteen inches apart. After the 
rains are over the sun bakes the road dry, 
so that when the next cold season comes 
the whole pathway for miles looks like a 
corduroy road, only instead of the trunks 
of trees the earth itself has become ridged. 

As oxen are short-steppers, these ridges, 
as before stated, are about eighteen inches 
apart, while the ruts between them are 
sometimes a foot deep, so that when a pony 
passes over such a road he has either to 
place his feet laboriously at the bottom of 
each rut, making slow, hard work of it, or 
he has to mince along, stepping from ridge 
to ridge like a circus horse walking upon 
casks, with the chance of slipping down a 
deep ridge into the rut and spraining his 
ankle or knee, something that happens not 
unfrequently. 

Some of the roads over which these cara- 
vans wend their way season after season 
are very old. For hundreds of years such 
caravans have been in the habit of passing 
over them. A curious proof of this is found 
in some of the mountains where the passes 
124 



Qt>t>6 anD )6nD0 of travel 

are narrow. These hills are often com- 
posed of sandstone, and tracks, just wide 
enough for a loaded ox to pass, have been 
worn into the solid rock itself. These tracks 
are ' — [_j — ' shaped. The bot- 

tom, or smaller part, is where the ox walks, 
while his baskets have, in course of time, 
worn a path upon either side of him. I 
once measured one of these tracks and 
found that the baskets had cut their way 
through a foot and a half of rock. How 
long it took may be conjectured, but it must 
have been a great while. 

In the Bhamo district the Chinese cara- 
van is seen as often as the Shan. Instead 
of bullocks they have mules or very small 
ponies. Poor things ! They are very dif- 
ferent from the plump, contented-looking 
pack-bullocks. A Chinaman is without 
mercy and loads his mules with just as 
much as they can stagger under. Cotton 
is a favorite load. It comes from Myingyan 
by steamer and mules then carry it into 
China, Bhamo being the place where it is 
transferred from river steamer to caravan. 
If one takes a side view of a mule loaded 
with cotton all that can be seen is a nose in 
front and four, usually crooked, legs be- 
neath, the rest of the animal being com- 
125 



®DD0 anD jBnt>0 trom iPagoOa XanD 

pletely covered and hidden from view by 
an immense bundle of cotton upon either 
side. The pack-saddles are very often 
badly padded and this causes great sores, 
several — each as large as a man's hand — 
being frequently seen upon the back of one 
mule, but such a state of affairs does not 
worry the Chinaman ; he loads his mules 
and drives them, sores or no sores. 

The leading mule of a caravan is often 
fantastically decorated. Huge rosettes of 
red cotton adorn his halter, while a red flag 
with a great, black character painted upon 
it is thrust through each bundle of cotton. 
Could the mule be gifted with the power 
that Balaam's mount had, however, he 
would surely say he would prefer a little 
less rosette and a little better pack-saddle. 

To see a Chinaman start out on a journey 
is an awe-inspiring sight. His pony is sad- 
dled, of course. Then a blanket is strapped 
above it ; then a bed is fastened on top of 
the blanket ; then come divers suits of 
clothes which will be required upon the 
journey and are laid layer upon layer ; 
then last of all another blanket or two is 
tied on top of all, making the whole con- 
cern a foot or two thick. Upon this the 
Chinaman, with his whip tied to his wrist, 
126 



©DD0 an& iBnt>3 of travel 

and his head roofed over with a hat as big 
as a fair-sized parasol, climbs cautiously 
and slowly till he mounts the summit, then 
he sticks his heels, not his toes, into huge 
rattan stirrups which are often but a few 
inches below the level of his horse's back, 
and rides slowly off, looking like a man 
riding upon the top of a miniature haystack 
gifted with locomotive powers. If Chinese 
mules were not the most patient animals 
in the universe, John would get a spill 
every few yards, but fortunately for him — 
the Chinaman, that is, not the mule — the 
latter jogs along and nothing save an earth- 
quake or a locomotive could discompose 
him. 

While speaking of the subject of travel it 
would not be fair to leave out the Burman 
ox-cart, for in Lower Burma, with the ex- 
ception of the rivers and the railroads, the 
ox-cart is the most popular agent for carry- 
ing goods. It is used almost exclusively in 
transporting goods in cities, and in the jun- 
gle, upon the plains, or over graded cart- 
roads upon the mountains it is the cheapest 
way to take goods from one place to an- 
other. The ox-cart is not a thing of beauty, 
but what it lacks on the score of good looks 
it more than makes up in usefulness, and if 
127 



©DD0 anO JBnDs trom iPagoDa XanD 

the old saw, ** Handsome is that handsome 
does " is true, then, without any doubt, it 
is good-looking as well. 

It may be well to say first what an ox- 
cart has not. It has no springs, it has no 
iron in its construction except the tires and 
the boxes of the wheels, nay, it is not so 
very long ago that there was no iron even 
in the wheels which were then solid. Four- 
teen years ago, when I made my first trip 
to Upper Burma, a large percentage of carts 
still had solid, tireless wheels, but these 
have now practically all disappeared and 
are at present seen in remote districts only. 
The axle of the ox-cart is made of wood 
and the body rests squarely upon it, so that 
if one has to pass over a road in which 
there are many ruts he should not choose 
an ox-cart as a conveyance ; still, upon 
smooth roads there are many worse modes 
of traveling. 

In shape the ox-cart resembles roughly a 
capital V. The angle is in front where it 
joins the yoke which it crosses at right 
angles. This yoke is merely a round piece 
of wood with two pegs at each end running 
through it, one on each side of the neck of 
each ox. The bottom or floor of the cart 
is usually made of stout strips of bamboo 
128 



®J)D6 anD BnDs ot travel 

fastened firmly together with rattan. Strong, 
heavy pegs of wood bind the cart to the 
axle while the yoke is joined to the front 
of the cart with rawhide. This is put on 
green and when dry makes, as might be 
expected, an exceedingly strong joint. A 
low railing runs along each side of the body 
and a cover of bamboo matting is some- 
times arched overhead as a protection 
against sun or rain. 

A team of two oxen is used in drawing 
these carts. There is practically no harness 
unless the yoke and pegs should be so 
called. The Burman ox, like his relative 
in India, has a large hump upon his shoulders 
and it is before this hump that the yoke 
rests, in fact, I am not sure that the yoke 
has not caused this hump, for the ox has 
been a beast of burden from time immemo- 
rial in the East. There is a rope which 
passes beneath the neck of each ox, but no 
weight, of course, comes upon that. A hole 
is bored in the nostril of a draft ox and 
through this a loop of cord is passed which 
is carried up and fastened behind the horns. 
A single rein is tied to this but it is not 
much used in driving, the driver depending 
mostly upon his stick to guide his team. 
It is wonderful what loads these carts will 
I 129 



©000 anO jen06 from iPagoDa XanD 

carry and over what roads the patient 
bullocks will draw them. 

The government roads make the life of 
an ox much easier than it was during the 
old Burmese times, but when one travels 
in the jungle proper he is, to all intents 
and purposes, so far as roads are con- 
cerned, back in pre-British times. These 
jungle roads are simply tracks which wind 
along, twisting and turning, as though the 
man who first made the way was drunk 
and did not know where his oxen were 
taking him. Often one comes to a nullah, 
or dry bed of a stream, the sides of which 
are very steep. Should a person new to 
the country look at the path crossing such 
a place it would seem impossible to go to 
the other side with a loaded cart. The 
Burman thinks differently, however. He 
holds his lines firmly in one hand and with 
the other flourishes a stick and yells at the 
top of his voice. He is aided by every on- 
looker too, for everybody that happens to 
be near at the time joins in to help make a 
regular chorus of yells. 

Down plunge the oxen as though nothing 
on earth could prevent their falling upon 
their noses and turning complete somer- 
saults; but although the ox is a clumsy- 
130 



®DJ>0 anD JBr\^0 of Zvavcl 

looking beast he is really very sure-footed. 
Down they rush with a tremendous clat- 
ter ; the cart jolts and jumps and bumps 
and is almost lost sight of amidst the clouds 
of dust raised by the heels of the oxen. 
It is a miracle that goods and passengers 
are not thrown out in a heap, but they very 
rarely are, and in the vast majority of cases 
reach the top of the farther bank in safety, 
even though well shaken-up during the 
passage. The impetus gained by the descent 
carries them half-way up the other bank ; 
then comes the strain to finish the other 
half. The yells increase ; the driver shouts 
and gesticulates like a maniac ; the oxen 
get their heads down till their noses are 
but an inch or two from the ground and 
heave and strain as up, up, up they go till 
a final shout of triumph from the driver 
tells that the top has been reached. 

The Burman is usually very kind to his 
oxen and feeds them well, so that they look 
fat, sleek, and in good condition. It is 
always easy to tell when a pair of oxen 
belongs to a native of India. In the latter 
case they are almost always thin, and what 
is even a surer sign, their tails are crooked. 
This is caused by a very cruel habit which 
the native of India has always, but the 
131 



Qt>t>Q anD BnOs trom iPagoDa XauD 

Burman very rarely indeed. Instead of 
striking his oxen to urge tliem forward, the 
native of India seizes their tails and twists 
them, thus causing great pain. Sometimes 
the joints are dislocated, which makes the 
tails hang crookedly and I have even known 
the bones to injure the nerve so that gan- 
grene takes place, the end of the tail falling 
off and leaving nothing but a stump behind. 
** The dark places of the earth are full of 
the habitations of cruelty." 

I have heard, but cannot vouch for its 
truth, that some Burmans believe that if 
they are cruel to their oxen, in some future 
birth their positions will be reversed ; the 
man will be an ox and the ox will be a man, 
and that coming together the former animal 
will ** take it out" of his former master 
with interest. It makes a good fable if 
nothing more. 

Travel in Burma is now generally of the 
humdrum order. In the old days "before 
the war," when the country swarmed with 
organized bands of robbers whose custom 
was to ambush travelers and shoot at them 
from behind, the opposite was the case ; 
but still, even now, there is sometimes a 
spice of danger, once in a while a good deal. 

Some ten years ago I was called to see a 
132 



®OD0 anD BnDs ot travel 

young British officer at the fort at Bampone, 
about a dozen miles from Mongnai, where 
I was stationed at that time. The officer's 
servant came to say that his master was 
very sick, so off I set post-haste to see 
what the trouble was. It was necessary 
to return that night, however, and as it was 
afternoon before I started, I did not stay at 
the fort very long, as I wished to get back 
to the mission house before dark. On the 
return trip my pony went lame, and to my 
sorrow night fell while I was leading him 
by the bridle four miles from home. 

The cause of my anxiety was the fact 
that a young elephant, not properly trained, 
had broken away from one of the mahouts 
in the service of the saubwa (native prince), 
and had developed into a regular rogue. 
He had taken up his residence in a wood a 
short distance from one of the city gates, 
and had inaugurated a reign of terror. He 
chased coolies bringing goods into the bazaar 
in broad daylight, and when they threw 
their baskets upon the ground in their panic 
the elephant would coolly rifle them of their 
contents ; what was good to eat he ate and 
what he could not dispose of in this way he 
destroyed, trampling it under foot or tear- 
ing it with his tusks and trunk. He had 
133 



®^^6 anD BnD0 trom iPagoDa XanD 

already killed seven men, but the saubwa 
would not have him killed, hoping later on 
to catch him, which I may say he afterwards 
did. Pending this happy termination of af- 
fairs people lived in danger of their lives. 

Fortunately, before he went off on his 
rampage, a wooden bell had been fastened 
around his neck, and this gave a little 
warning of his approach during daylight, 
but at night while engaged in his favorite 
pastime of stripping gardens it was difficult, 
even when the bell was heard, to place him 
exactly. He had made our side of the city 
his "stamping-ground" too — worse luck — 
a stamping-ground in more senses than one, 
and as it was necessary for me to cross 
over a mile of foothills which lay between 
the mission house and the last range of 
mountains, and as I was liable to meet 
the rogue at any moment, it was a very 
uncomfortable feeling to experience. 

Had he happened to be around that night 
this book would certainly never have been 
written, and another mound of "mission- 
ary dust " would have been raised in Burma, 
for it would have been impossible to escape. 
Fortunately, after what seemed to me one 
of the longest journeys I ever made, I heard 
the tinkle, tinkle of the pagoda bells, sure 
134 



©DOS anD BnDs of XTravcl 

signal that the city was at hand, and 
in a few moments entered the mission 
compound. 

I recall another unpleasant night journey 
that I once took. One evening word was 
brought to me that my little girl, just one 
year old, and then staying with her mother 
upon the mountains, was very sick, in fact 
was unconscious when the messenger left. 
It was just getting dark when the letter 
arrived ; the house where the child was, 
stood upon the top of a mountain more 
than four thousand feet above the Bhamo 
plain and thirty-nine miles away. I had a 
pony, of course, but as there was no moon 
it was necessary to have a light and some- 
body to carry it, as it would be impossible 
to travel along narrow jungle paths without 
one. 

I found a Kachin guide and set out, not 
without a good deal of argument, however. 
The Kachin objected to travel at night, but 
when he found the usual argument of ** to- 
morrow will do just as well as to-day " was 
not strong enough to prevent my starting, 
he said that several tigers had taken up 
their abode in the jungle through which we 
would have to pass and that he was afraid 
to go. 1 pulled out a big forty-five Colt 
135 



©DD0 anD BnDs from pagoDa ILanD 

and asked him if that would not fix any- 
thing we were likely to meet that night, 
and so after a good deal more talk we at 
last set out. One great inducement that I 
offered was the paying of an amount equal 
to six days' wages for that one night's work, 
and as that meant enough money to keep 
him in idleness for a month at least, it was 
well worth a little risk. 

We had not traveled very far before my 
pony went lame, so there was nothing to 
do but get off and lead him. It was quite 
uncanny. Soon after we struck the foot 
of the mountains my guide pulled out his 
long sword and held it naked in his hand. 
Just why he did so would be hard to say, 
for it would be a very small tiger indeed 
that would be overawed by a Kachin sword. 
He begged me too, to carry my revolver in 
my hand, which I did, more to please him 
than anything else, for a revolver, save in 
the hands of a very skilful shot — some- 
thing I am very far from being — is of little 
use against a tiger, which is a yellow and 
black streak of lightning when it springs 
upon its prey, and a man might be thrown 
down and carried off into the jungle dead 
with a pistol in each hand. 

Then the pony got frightened. He stood 
136 



®DD0 anD iBnOs ot travel 

still and refused to budge ; then suddenly 
he lowered his head and tried to bolt, and 
if I had not taken the precaution to get a 
good grip upon the reins would have dashed 
off headlong down the hillside before one 
could count ten. This frightened the Kachin 
still more. He knew a little Shan, so that 
I was able to talk with him, and in a fright- 
ened whisper he said, "That horse smells 
a tiger, we shall be killed and eaten sure," 
then he walked just as close to me as I 
would allow, one of the most thoroughly 
scared men I have ever seen. Fear is con- 
tagious too, and although I laughed at my 
guide and soothed the pony, yet when I 
heard a tremendous crash and then a rush 
through the jungle, while I knew it was 
nothing but a frightened deer, to my ex- 
cited fancy it sounded as though it must 
have been caused by an elephant at the 
very least. 

We pushed on till we had covered more 
than twenty miles and had climbed a couple 
of thousand feet, then the guide gave out 
and said he could march no more without 
sleep. I was weary too, but too anxious 
to rest, let alone sleep, so 1 said I would 
mount guard and he could take a nap for 
fifteen minutes and we would then push on 
137 



©DOS atiD BnD6 trom iPagoDa XanD 

again. He forthwith laid himself upon the 
path just where he was, with his head 
upon his folded arms, and was asleep in 
ten seconds ; but if he fell asleep easily he 
made up for it in the difficulty of waking 
up, for I shouted and shook, shook and 
shouted, till at last I managed to get some 
sense into his head. He grumbled a great 
deal at the shortness of his nap, declared 
his feet were so sore that he could not 
walk, and so forth and so forth, but finally 
consented to rise and we set off once more, 
the threat that I would go forward and 
leave him alone being the chief argument 
to get him upon his feet once more. 

We had not gone more than a mile or 
two when we saw a light a little bit ahead, 
and upon getting closer discovered it to be 
a Kachin camp. This was the last straw 
to my guide ; he just simply said he would 
go no further if I offered him three times 
the amount I had. He wedged himself in 
between two fellow-countrymen who had 
made their beds upon a heap of dry grass, 
and I saw it would be necessary to travel 
the balance of the journey without him. 
By this time, however, the road was much 
more open. It did not lie through the 
dense jungle as it had for so many miles, 
138 



®&D0 anD BnDs ot XTravcl 

but over hillsides which had been burned 
by Kachins when mailing paddy fields, but 
best of all there was a little gray light 
toward the East which showed that day- 
light was not very far off, so I left him 
behind and finished the journey alone, and 
arrived at the end of my march at about 
ten o'clock in the morning. This was, I 
think, the most unpleasant short trip I 
ever made. 

In 1891 Doctor Gushing, Mrs. Mix, my 
wife, and myself went to Mongnai in the 
Southern Shan States to open up mission 
work there, and after a short time Mrs. 
Mix and Doctor Gushing returned to Lower 
Burma leaving us to hold the fort alone. 

Everything went well for a few months 
and then my wife was taken sick with an 
attack of appendicitis, and it became neces- 
sary to carry her to the railroad and after- 
ward take her home to America. It was a 
terrible journey, such a one as I pray I may 
never again have to take. It was in the 
middle of the rains ; for days together it 
rained incessantly, and the wet clothes 
taken off at night and hung up to dry above 
a smoky fire, were soaked again a few 
minutes after the start from the zayat next 
morning. A rubber sheet had been fas- 
139 



©DDs anD SnDs trom ipagoDa XanD 

tened over the stretcher in which my wife 
was carried and, thanks to this, she was 
the only person who could boast of a dry 
thread at the end of each day's march. 

Often it was impossible to carry the 
stretcher along the usual paths — they were 
not wide enough — and so we had to chop 
our way through the jungle, sometimes not 
covering more than a mile after four or five 
hours' hard work ; sometimes we had to 
wade up streams knee or waist-deep, which 
had taken the place of the dry beds over 
which one would travel in comfort during 
the dry season. The villagers were busy 
in their paddy-fields and did not want to 
leave their work to carry the stretcher 
from village to village, and ran away unless 
closely watched. 

At last to our great joy, mine I ought 
rather to say, for Mrs. Griggs was uncon- 
scious a great part of the time, the tops of 
the houses at Fort Stedman appeared, and 
we entered the compound of the rest-bunga- 
low. We had left our cook beside a hedge 
by the roadside, dead drunk, several days 
before ; the syce had also disappeared ; we 
were wet, dirty, and almost exhausted, but 
the ladies of the regiment stationed there 
acted the part of the good Samaritan to us ; 
140 



®DD0 anD EnDs ot ^Travel 

they sent their servants to cook for us ; 
and, in short, put us under a debt of 
gratitude we shall never be able to repay. 

Bright and early next morning we started 
out along a broad government road with 
eight coolies carrying my wife, and others 
to carry the provisions and other neces- 
saries, all under contract to go to the rail- 
road with us. But our trials were not all 
over yet. There is a stretch of country to 
be traveled between Fort Stedman and 
Thazi, where one strikes the railroad, 
which at that tinie was absolutely without 
a habitation for three days* journey, save 
for the rest-bungalows every dozen miles. 
When we had traversed half of this dis- 
tance and were four or five miles from the 
next bungalow and two days from the 
nearest village, the coolies who had been 
grumbling for some days, suddenly went 
on strike. They set the stretcher in the 
middle of the road and coolly said they 
would go no farther. I told them that it 
was a case of life and death ; that my wife 
must get home or she would die ; but it made 
no difference, they said they were tired and 
would carry no farther — not one single step. 

Then I got angry, and I think such anger 
would be entered by the recording angel 
141 



©DDs auD BnD0 trom iPafloDa UanD 

under the ** and sin not " column. Step- 
ping into the middle of the road between 
the coolies and Fort Stedman I drew my 
revolver, the same old Colt that years 
afterward comforted the heart of the Kachin 
guide before-mentioned, and said : 

** Now, see here. Last night I showed 
you how this weapon shoots. You saw the 
hole the bullet made right through the 
trunk of a small tree. Now run, all of you, 
but six will never reach home. Which one 
will be the first ? '' 

They looked at the muzzle of that gun 
and, I suppose, seeing that I meant business 
quickly decided it would be policy to pick 
up that stretcher again and move on, and for 
the balance of the day's journey I marched 
in the rear carrying the cocked revolver in 
my hand. 

So far so well, but after getting to the 
rest-bungalow, the Burmese Bible-woman 
who helped the Karen nurse look after my 
wife came to me and said : 

"Soya, the coolies have been talking in 
Burmese; they did not know that I could 
understand them, and so I listened. They 
said they were afraid to run away in the 
daytime for they felt sure you would do as 
you said and shoot them, but they intend 
142 



©DD0 ant) jEnDs ot XTravel 

running off in the middle of the night, and 
as you do not know their names nobody at 
the prince's court would be able to pun- 
ish them for breaking their contract and 
leaving you in the lurch." 

Here, then, was a dilemma indeed. Two 
days away from the nearest village and 
every coolie with plans laid to desert us. 
I walked out of the compound and down 
the road a little to think it over by myself. 
At any other time I would have enjoyed 
the view, which was magnificent. Great 
mountains hemmed us in upon every hand, 
their sides covered with trees from top to 
bottom ; the setting sun lit up a great 
valley hundreds of feet below, and painted 
the sky above us a thousand colors, but I 
was too worried and anxious to care about 
the beauties of the scenery; in fact, I was 
at my wits' end. I could not march all 
day and sit up all night to watch the 
coolies ; what was I to do ? 

The evening breezes shook the leaves 
upon the trees and hummed through the 
telegraph wires which followed the road 
from the plain to Fort Stedman, now far, 
far to our rear, and as I heard the sound, 
quick as a flash along the wires a plan 
shot into my mind. 

143 



®DD6 anD )£nD6 trom iPagoDa ILanD 

I hurried back to the bungalow and 
called the coolies. They came, sullen at 
being defeated in their plans, and yet at the 
same time I thought I could detect a gleam 
in their eyes which showed they were con- 
fident, even then, of getting their own 
way. I had placed my pistol upon the 
table before calling them, and pointing to 
it, I said : 

" Listen. You threatened to run away 
to-day although you have signed an agree- 
ment to carry my wife to the railroad. 
You know what Shan custom is ; two men 
sometimes carry a sick friend or at most 
four, but in order to make it easy for you I 
have called eight of you. You know too, 
that the English governor will punish you 
if your prince does not, should he hear the 
report that you deserted me in this out-of- 
the-way place. Now listen carefully. In 
the daytime you dare not run away, but 
this woman here is a Burman and she 
understood what you said in Burmese just 
now." 

The men looked at each other sheepishly 
at this but made no reply. 

**Now, look here," I exclaimed, point- 
ing out of the door. "What do you see 
there ? " 

144 



®dD0 an& l6nD6 ot ^Travel 

** That is a telegraph wire/' one of them 
replied. 

**How long does it take to send a 
message along that wire ? " I demanded. 

" Why, not a second," the same replied. 

Now I had counted upon their knowing 
this much and also upon their ignorance of 
the fact that a person could not send a 
message along the wire save from a tele- 
graph station and I found I was right. The 
coolies thought that I could **shin'* up a 
telegraph pole and presto ! the news would 
be at the governor's house at Fort Stedman 
immediately. It was an unusual specimen 
of the little knowledge again. 

**Very well, then," said I, with all the 
dignity I could summon up to my aid, " run 
away if you wish to-night when it is dark ; 
I shall not sit up to watch you ; but let me 
give you a little advice : don't return to 
your homes, the order to have you arrested 
will be there ahead of you. You know 
what that means. Now go and think over 
it." . 

I saw a twinkle in the eye of the Bible- 
woman, but she was loyal and kept silent, 
although I must acknowledge when I saw 
the effect of my ** bluff," and how deject- 
edly the men filed out of the room, it was 
K 145 



©D&0 anD iBntfS trom ipafloDa XanD 

hard work to keep a straight face. It was 
enough, however ; bluff though it was, it 
worked, and next morning the coolies were 
up bright and early ; they made better time 
that day than upon any other previous day 
and I did not have to even hint at force, 
but several times during the march I saw 
them glance up at that little strand of wire 
and then say something to each other. I 
do not doubt but what they thought the 
white foreigner a wonderful man. As for 
myself, I said nothing ; I merely smiled, a 
good, big, broad smile — not a bit smaller or 
narrower because I dared not show it upon 
my face — it was inside. 

One of the most unpleasant experiences a 
traveler can have is to get his bed and bed- 
ding wet. A ** jungle-bed " is really a thick 
cotton comfortable, and it, together with 
blankets, each morning is rolled up in a rub- 
ber sheet before starting, and although the 
fogs upon the Shan hills are very heavy and 
soak one's clothing like a mild shower of 
rain, yet if the rubber sheet is properly tied, 
the bedding inside remains dry. Some- 
times, however, in crossing a stream the 
coolie carrying your bed makes a misstep 
or goes into a hole, carrying the bed with 
146 



®D&0 anD JBntfB ot travel 

him ; then no rubber sheet will keep out 
the water, and you arrive at the end of a 
long day's march with the prospect of at 
least a damp bed to sleep on. 

The coolies light a big fire and the things 
are spread around to dry, but a great deal 
of dirt and smoke go along with a small 
amount of heat, so that your bed is always 
made dirty, often scorched in places and 
wet elsewhere — an uncomfortable sort of 
patchwork. 

I remember spending one night under the 
floor of an old bungalow. Some reader 
may, perhaps, wonder why we went under 
the floor. Well, the reason was there was 
no roof to the bungalow, and as clouds, big, 
black, and threatening, were coming up 
rapidly, we made up our minds to crawl 
under the floor, hoping that it would afford 
us at least a little protection. The bunga- 
low was made of bamboos, but the white 
ants and " borers " had worked industri- 
ously at it ; the wind had blown off the 
thatch roof, and every post stood at a dif- 
ferent angle. The floor was about three 
feet above the ground upon which we spread 
our beds. It — the floor — was made of split 
bamboos, and when the rain came protected 
us as much as a great sieve. We — the 
147 



O^bs anb JBnbB tcom iPasoDa XanO 

missionaries — covered ourselves with our 
rubber blankets, while the coolies squatted 
together beneath their big hats and covered 
themselves as well as they could with their 
thin cotton blankets. 

I was so dead-tired with the day's march 
that not even the rain could keep me awake 
the whole night, but I frequently woke up 
after dreaming that I was a boy once more 
and my companions were covering me with 
sand, to fmd that the water had collected 
in all the little hollows of my rubber sheet 
and weighed several pounds at least. A 
movement was sufficient to change that 
state of affairs, fortunately. 

The next morning we could all truthfully 
say we were drenched to the skin. Every- 
thing we owned was soaked through and 
through except the cooking-pots, and they 
were wet both sides — inside and out; but a 
few hours' march and a few hours* sunshine 
dried everything, and not a soul became 
sick. 

One thing that makes traveling upon the 
mountains hard is the fact that the temper- 
ature takes very sudden changes. I have 
frequently started out of a morning when it 
has been so cold that there was a slight 
white frost upon the grass, which would be 
148 



®DD5 anD BnDs ot (Travel 

loaded with moisture as cold as ice-water — 
this would be upon the top of a mountain ; 
we would descend to the valley and here it 
would be uncomfortably warm, so warm 
that the thin coat of khaki would feel a lit- 
tle too much for comfort, while an overcoat 
had been none too heavy early that morn- 
ning before daylight. This, as a friend at 
home once said, *' was enough to wear out 
a thermometer." It tends to wear out the 
missionary as well. 

The intensity of the cold upon these 
mountains cannot be gauged by a thermome- 
ter, either, for the air is so damp that it 
feels much colder than the same degree at 
home. The sudden changes of cold to heat 
and back again to cold all in one day's ex- 
perience is much harder to bear than a 
steady heat or a steady cold. Many a time 
upon the mountains I have worn a heavy 
overcoat and yet felt cold, and yet the cool- 
ies carrying my bed and provisions have 
been clothed in but two garments, trousers 
and jacket, made out of cotton, with some- 
times a cotton blanket, no larger than a good- 
sized shawl at home and not half so warm, to 
cover them at night. Thus dressed and with- 
out shoes they would march through grass 
laden with white frost and beneath trees 
149 



©^tf6 anD JEnDs trom iPagoDa XanD 

dropping water as cold as the frost. How 
they stood it was a mystery to me, and yet 
they did not appear to suffer much more 
than I did. 

Under such circumstances it is easy to 
understand the admiration which our thici< 
woolen clothes caused among these half- 
naked Shan coolies. They gazed enviously 
at my sweater, thick and warm, as well as 
the long overcoat I wore, and above all at 
the thick woolen blankets that covered us 
at night. One and all they declared they 
were the most " handsome " things they 
had ever seen ; in fact they had never im- 
agined it possible to make such warm, 
beautiful blankets. What lucky, fortunate 
people we were to possess them ! 

It must be understood that these changes 
of temperature happen upon the mountains. 
White frost is never, of course, seen upon 
the plains, where it is never so cold as upon 
the hills, and I often congratulate myself 
that my work does not now carry me into 
the " hill and water country " as the Shan 
calls his home. 

And yet many of the sights upon the hills 
are so beautiful that they more than counter- 
balance the inconveniences suffered. The 
fogs, so cold and damp, are at the same 
150 



®DD6 anD JSn^s of travel 

time often very beautiful. Starting soon 
after daylight on a cheerless morning and 
marching after shivering coolies through 
long, damp grass, often waist-high, is not 
very exhilarating ; it feels like walking, as 
it is, in fact, through the clouds, but as the 
sun gains power the mist-clouds upon the 
very tops of the mountains lift, and one can 
see peak above peak and peak beyond peak, 
rising out of what looks like pure white 
snow. The bottoms of the mountains and 
the valleys are filled up with white masses 
and billows of mist ; then slowly the clouds 
disperse and the beautiful valleys appear 
and disappear as the mist rises or is blown 
about hither and thither by the wind ; some- 
times whole seas of clouds are rolled and 
tumbled about, hiding and then disclosing 
a panorama too beautiful to be described in 
words. 

How would you like to drink out of a cup 
five feet long ? That is what you might 
have to do were you to take a trip to the 
hills of Burma. These — what should they 
be called } Well, these water-carrying 
utensils are made out of large bamboos. 
One is cut down and five feet or so of the 
largest end is cut off ; the knots inside are 



®DD0 anD BnD0 trom iPaaoOa XanD 

broken down and the cup, bucket, or pipe, 
whichever the reader chooses to call it, is 
ready for use. 

I remember very well the first time I saw 
one. It was evening and we were nearing 
the end of our day's march, when I heard 
a great whooping and shouting, and a dozen 
small boys from a monastery school near-by 
dashed across the path. Each one carried 
a section of bamboo upon his shoulder and 
was making his way towards the river. My 
companion at that time was an Englishman, 
an old pensioner, who had lived in Burma 
many years and had once been a soldier in 
the British army, and as he seemed to know 
most everything about the country, I asked 
him what the boys were doing with those 
bamboos. 

" They are going to fetch water for the 
monastery," he replied. 

Then I watched them fill their bamboos 
at the river and return, much slower this 
time, for their loads were heavy. As they 
neared us they stopped to look at us, as 
much interested in us as I was in them, and 
Wright — my companion — calling to one of 
the boys, said he was thirsty and would 
like a drink. 

The youngster — he had two bamboos by 
152 



©DDs anD BnDs ot travel 

the way — propped one against the trunk of 
a tree and takhig hold of the middle of the 
other tilted it, and Wright, putting one end 
to his mouth, took a good, long pull, after- 
wards declaring it was the best drink he had 
had for days. 

I was very thirsty too, and the sound of 
the water gurgling in the long bamboo 
sounded very tempting, so I took my friend's 
place and imitated him as well as I was 
able. I tilted the bamboo as I had seen him 
do but no water would come ; I tilted still 
more but although I could hear the water 
inside gurgling away I could not coax out a 
single drop. 

** Be careful ! " cried Wright, " the water 
sometimes comes with a rush when it does 
come," so more carefully than ever I tilted 
the bamboo just a little wee bit more. Then 
I got my drink, a whole bucketful, but out- 
side instead of inside, and I jumped away 
from the treacherous bamboo wet to the 
waist. I fought shy of bamboo-joints after 
that for a good while, but at last got so used 
to them that I was able to drink without 
taking a bath at the same time. 

So much space has been used in telling 
of hill travel that the river and river travel 
run a great chance of being left out alto- 
153 



®DDs anD BnDs from lpa90t)a XanD 

gether. In some ways river travel is the 
easiest kind ; certainly it is the laziest for 
the passenger who has nothing to do but sit 
still and be poled along the bank if one is 
going up-stream ; while coming with the 
current, nothing is done by the boatman 
either, save keeping the boat head-on, allow- 
ing it to be carried along at a rate which 
varies with the seasons of the year. 

The Burman is a born waterman. He 
learns to swim almost as soon as he learns 
to walk, and is expert and fearless. In 
handling boats too, he is graceful as well as 
skilful. He paddles his boat sitting or 
standing, with his face toward his destina- 
tion ; exactly opposite to our method of 
handling anything save a canoe. 

Burman boats vary in size, from those 
that are so narrow that as a man once told 
me, ** he had to part his hair in the middle 
for fear he would overbalance the boat," 
all the way up to a vessel which rejoices in 
a sail and is four or five feet across. 

Although these larger boats have sails yet 
they are rarely used, the Burman depend- 
ing upon his pole. This is a long bamboo 
— almost everything else in Burma is a 
bamboo — and is thrust into the river bank, 
the man standing in the bow of his boat. 
154 



©ODs anD BnD6 ot travel 

The boatman seizes the other end of the 
pole, places it against his shoulder and 
commences to walk aft, thus forcing the 
boat in the opposite direction just as fast as 
he walks. 

Cotton boats are larger than the general 
run. They take the cotton from the river 
steamers and carry it up the Tai Ping River 
and other small creeks. This makes a 
very heavy load, and to meet this emer- 
gency two boats are firmly lashed together, 
a deck is placed over all and the cotton 
loaded upon it from gunwale to gunwale. 
A dozen polers are sometimes required to 
drive such a vessel up-stream. The way 
this is done is unique. There is no room 
upon the deck of the boat itself, so a narrow 
platform of bamboos, the entire length of 
the boat, is fastened outside upon a level 
with the deck. The polers take up their 
station at the bow end of this platform, 
standing as closely to each other as possi- 
ble, then every man puts his pole in the 
mud and they all walk aft just like a single 
man while the boat slowly takes it way up 
the river, following every twist and turn of 
the bank. 

There are also boat-houses in which 
whole families live. These are sometimes 
155 



®DD0 anD )EnD6 trom iPagoDa XanD 

made of two boats with a floor laid upon 
them ; sometimes bamboos support the 
house which otherwise much resembles an 
ordinary land house. 

A very common sight upon the river is 
a raft. Sometimes these are composed of 
teak logs, sometimes of a great many bun- 
dles of bamboos. These are guided on 
their voyage down river by great sweeps, 
but as the current is very sluggish the rate 
of speed is, of course, very slow. A small 
hut is built at one end for the accommoda- 
tion of the raftmen, and in it they cook, 
eat, and sleep. These bamboo rafts often 
start far up the river and come slowly down, 
taking weeks to make the journey, till they 
reach Lower Burma where the bamboo is 
sold, the crew returning by steamer or train. 



156 



H Jfevo flnt0tafte0 




IV 

HE easiest thing in the world is to 
make a mistake," even in America. 
There is no word in English which 
signifies easier than the easiest, unfortu- 
nately ; if there were I would use it when 
speaking of the ease with which one makes 
mistakes in Burma. Certainly *' they are 
worse and more of them." 

Some mistakes which a man makes, espe- 
cially during the first year or two in the 
country, are only ludicrous, and one often- 
times laughs at them afterward as though 
the joke had been at somebody's else ex- 
pense ; some mistakes, upon the other hand, 
prove very embarrassing, nay, they may 
even do a lot of harm before they are cor- 
rected. Fortunately, however, the vast 
majority can be classed under the kind first 
mentioned and produce nothing worse than 
a laugh or a passing mortification. 

At first the most numerous mistakes arise 
from an imperfect knowledge of the lan- 
guage of the country. Shan, for instance, 
is a tonal language, so that the same 
159 



OD06 anD JBn^e txom paaoC>a XanC> 

word may mean a most surprising, and at 
the same time puzzling number of things, 
each being represented by a different tone; 
so that, as there are rive tones and some of 
these tones are further divided into the 
closed, the open, and the intermediate 
sound — though not all, fortunately — a person 
may get the right word, and yet his chances 
are fifteen to one against getting the right 
tone. Of course the sense and context 
often show the native what the missionary 
ought to have said but did not. For in- 
stance, mail means a horse, a dog, the 
shoulder, to be mad, or to come, according 
to the tone you use — or ought to use. 

It is said that the wife of one of our Shan 
missionaries for a long time always called 
out "dog, dog, dog," instead of **come, 
come, come ! " 

The difference in Shan between a physi- 
cian and a tobacco-pipe is not much ; it is 
merely a tone, the same word does duty 
for both. I have more than once heard a 
man read of the wife of Jesus Christ instead 
of the mother. There is nothing in the 
written word to show which is meant al- 
though in speaking there is a considerable 
difference ; often the context here would 
not help matters either. 
i6o 



B jFcw flltstahcs 

Soon after I reached Mongnai, in the 
Southern Shan States, I received word from 
home that a box of seeds was on its way 
from America. The sau pa (native prince) 
had quite a nice garden, of which he was 
very proud, and knowing how pleased he 
would be to get some American seeds, I 
called a preacher and told him to go to the 
hau (palace) and let the sau pa know the 
seeds were coming and that I would give 
him some directly they arrived. I saw the 
preacher looked rather surprised, but he 
said he would go. 

" You can tell him," I added, as he went 
out of the door, **that when they come 1 
will show him how to plant them." 

The man looked astounded, and repeated 
after me, "Plant them ? '' 

** Yes, plant them,'* I cried, ** what else 
would you do with seeds ? Don't you 
always plant seeds ? " 

**Why, no," he replied slowly, ** they 
will rust." 

It was now my turn to look surprised and 
I saw there was a misunderstanding some- 
where. ** Plant them," repeated the 
preacher to himself ; then a smile broke 
over his face, he nodded and said, " You 
mean little round things which we plant in 
L i6i 



®DD0 anD JEnDs from ipaaoDa XanD 

the ground and which afterward grow and 
become flowers, don't you ? ** 

**Of course I do,*' I replied, ** that is 
what I have been telling you for the last 
five minutes.*' 

The smile on the old man's face deepened 
into a broad grin ; then he shook his head, 
and said, ** No, teacher, you did not say 
seeds, you said this," and he pointed to a 
knife in his girdle. No wonder he was sur- 
prised to be told that I was going to give 
some knives to the sau pa, and still more 
when told he was to plant them in the 
ground. 

At another time I gravely told some Shans 
that in our country in the cold season I had 
often seen a foot or two of raw native sugar 
upon the ground everywhere as far as the 
eye could reach. 

** Where did it come from ? " asked one 
of the listeners. 

**Why, it falls from the clouds just as 
rain falls here," I replied. The men gasped 
in astonishment and I smiled at their 
wonder. 

The same old preacher was sitting at my 
side ; he coughed a little apologetic cough 
and then said : 

** The teacher makes a slight mistake. 
162 



21 3Few flQi0take0 

He does not mean raw sugar, he means 
snow.*' 

Then I laughed, but I was glad the old 
preacher happened to be there because the 
visitors were men from the city who fre- 
quently came to the meetings, and at some 
time the story of Ananias might perchance 
be told in their hearing, and they might 
then remember my sugar story and wonder 
why the same fate had not overtaken me. 

Burmese is, to a certain extent, a tonal 
language also, as it has accents — the long 
and the short as they are called — but these 
accents are not so pronounced, nor are there 
so many of them, as in Shan, and yet the 
unwary are very likely to make foolish mis- 
takes too. To this very day I do not know 
the difference between a monastery and a 
cat; one is and the other isn't, but which it 
is I can never tell. 

The Burmese word for carriage isya tah ; 
for fire, me; and when Doctor Judson trans- 
lated the Bible, he called the chariot of fire 
that took the prophet Elijah to heaven a 
meya tah. When locomotives were intro- 
duced into Burma there was, of course, no 
word for them, and so one had to be coined, 
and the steam-engine is called a fire-car- 
riage, a meya tah, so that a few years ago 
163 



®DD3 an& BnD3 from iPaiioC»a Xan^ 

when the hiternational Sunday-school les- 
sons were taken from the Old Testament 
and the story of Elijah came around, it was 
necessary to explain to some of the Sunday- 
school scholars that the great prophet did 
not go to heaven in a railroad train, as some 
of them naturally supposed, hi fact, one 
small boy asked the teacher ** how they 
fixed the tracks! " 

What I consider the most remarkable 
specimen of exegesis I have ever heard 
came from the lips of an old Shan man one 
Sunday afternoon. He was preaching, and 
took for his subject the account of the sheet 
let down from heaven as Peter saw it in his 
dream. In substance this was what he said: 

** My younger brethren : Peter was asleep 
one day upon the top of a house, as was 
his custom, and whilst sleeping he had a 
dream good to marvel at. He dreamed that 
a great blanket was let down from the sky 
by its four corners, and inside this blanket 
were a great many animals — animals of all 
sorts, good and bad. Then Peter heard a 
voice, which said : * Peter, oiV, arise, kill 
and eat.' 

**Now, my younger brethren, you must 
not forget that before Peter became a 
Christian he was a heathen, just like you 
164 



B 3Fcw /Bbtstaftes 

and me. He had always feared to kill any 
animal for food because he thought that he 
would be punished for so doing by being 
sent to hell and having to live there thou- 
sands and thousands of years and after- 
wards suffer several thousand re-births as 
an animal. Just as you and I once were, 
you see. So what did Peter say ? Why 
he said : * No, Lord; I cannot kill these ani- 
mals. It is not lawful. I have never killed 
an animal in my life. I am not brave 
enough to do such an act as that.' 

** Then God spoke out of heaven and 
said : ' Peter, oie^ don't be afraid to kill 
them. When you were a heathen man, 
Peter, you feared to kill an animal for food, 
but you are a Christian now and so you 
need not fear.' 

" Now, then, what does this lesson teach 
us } Why, it teaches us that we need not 
be afraid to kill animals for our food and 
eat them afterwards in our curry. It is not 
a sin, although the heathen man says it is, 
so let us eat meat curry without fear. It 
is because of this that our religion is called 
the * chicken-killing religion'" (i.e.y a re- 
ligion that permits its worshipers to kill 
chickens and eat them ; Buddhists are sup- 
posed not to take life in any way). 
165 



®DD6 anD BnDs trom iPafloOa 3LanD 

Once I was out walking with Doctor 
Gushing, the greatest authority on Shan 
and the translator of the Bible into that 
language. An old woman came walking 
toward us and the doctor inquired politely 
where she had been to, about the only 
salutation there is in Shan except, ** Where 
are you going to ? " She answered, as I 
understood,**! have been to a Shan's 
house.'* As there were a few hundred 
houses in the city and all were inhabited 
by Shans, I thought the answer very vague, 
to say the least, and asked Doctor Gushing 
if he did not think so too. He smiled and 
said: ** That old woman said she had been 
to the house of a dead man," Then I re- 
membered that a Shan man and a dead 
man differed but in tone, the word was the 
same, and I felt like saying, although I 
did not for fear of shocking the doctor, 
" Gonfound those tones, anyway." 

A good many years ago one of our mis- 
sionaries and his wife took a trip through 
the Southern Shan States. In those days 
traveling was often a dangerous business, 
so that it was necessary to watch the camp 
all night long, and the doctor, his wife, and 
a Ghristian Shan arranged to take turns in 
performing this duty. One night the doctor 
1 66 



21 3Few ^I6taftc0 

said he would take the first watch, the 
preacher was to take the second, and the 
missionary's wife the third. They had but 
one timepiece between them and that had 
met with an accident and was useless, so it 
was arranged that the doctor's wife should 
call everybody when a certain star appeared 
above the top of the mountains; that would 
be about an hour before sunrise. They 
wished to get an extra early start as they 
had a very hard day's travel before them. 

Everybody except the doctor, therefore, 
turned in, rolled themselves up in their 
blankets, and went to sleep. It is very 
monotonous work that, watching a sleeping 
camp with nothing to do ; the doctor was 
wearied too, with a long day's tramp, and so 
— we must tell the truth — after a while he 
nodded, nodded again, and then was as 
sound asleep as anybody else in the camp. 
He awoke at last with a start, and as he 
looked up, there, hanging right above the 
mountain peak, was the star — he had slept 
all night long 1 

His wife congratulated him upon the way 
he had kept watch, and yet she was glad 
she had missed her turn too. She told him 
several times that she considered it quite a 
joke upon him, and then they prepared 
167 



®DD0 anD SnDs from ipa^oOa XanO 

to start upon their journey. The coolies 
grumbled at getting up so early ; they said 
it had been a very short night and that it 
was not custom to get up so long before 
daylight; but the doctor was firm and, in 
spite of their grumbling, off they went 
through the dark forest. 

They had not traveled very far before 
they saw some flickering lights in the dis- 
tance, which proved to be torches in the 
hands of Shan coolies. "They too have 
made an early start," observed the doctor ; 
then when the new-comers were within 
speaking distance, he said: "Are you on 
your way to bazaar, friends ? " 

The coolies paused, then the foremost 
said: "Going to bazaar? Why, no; we 
are coming from bazaar and are on our way 
home; we hope to arrive there soon." 

" What made you start so early? " asked 
the missionary. 

"Early? " echoed the coolies in chorus, 
looking wonderingly at the white man. 
"What do you mean by early? It is late 
at night, six hours after sunset." 

The doctor looked at his wife, then they 
both looked at the star. There it shone, 
brilliant as ever; but it was the wrong one ! 

Some of the funniest mistakes I have 
i68 



B 3few mtstaftes 

ever met with have been made by boys in 
our school while learning English. 

Some time ago one wrote : ** The enemy 
was driven off in a picnic," meaning, of 
course, ** panic." Another boy, in answer 
to a question in plane geometry, said : " A 
postulate has a ruler and a pair of com- 
passes with which to draw straight lines 
and circles." 

I once told some of the larger boys to write 
an account of one of the miracles recorded 
in the New Testament. He chose the feed- 
ing of the five thousand, and among other 
things said: ** Christ made the people sit 
down upon the grass; then he ate them all," 
instead of saying, ** Then he fed them all." 

In English dictation, a few days ago, the 
following sentence occurred, ** The mayor 
said the king shook hands with him," and 
one of the scholars wrote, " The mayor said 
the king should hang with him." 

The following is a paraphrase of part of 
one of Byron's poems, ** The Destruction 
of Sennacherib's Army." 

These are the verses as the poet wrote 
them : 

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the 

blast, 
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed ; 
169 



®DD0 auD BnDs ttom iPagoDa 3LanD 

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, 
And their hearts but once heaved and forever grew 
still. 

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, 
But through it there rolled not the breath of his 

pride ; 
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf. 
And cold as the spray of the rock-beaten surf. 

This is the way one of the boys para- 
phrased it : 

The Angel fly on the wind 

And passed through the face of the soldiers 

The soldiers are shaked their body and die. 

The horse died with a wide nose 
The horse died here and there 
The horse lay dead with water which came from its 
mouth when we seen it was very tired. 

A small native of India recorded the fact 
that, ** Half a bread is better than no loaf." 

Every Monday morning the teacher of 
each class sends up a list of the schoolboys 
absent the day before from Sunday-school 
with the excuses offered. Here is a sample: 

**He said that he got a sore on his left 
paw and could not walk well." 

English is — I am at a loss as to what ad- 
jective ought to be put here. It is certainly 
the most trying, puzzling, and difficult lan- 
170 



U 3Fcw /IRi6taftC6 

guage to teach as well as to learn. Witness 
the following : 

The teacher of one of the classes told 
his boys that " oxen " is the plural form of 
**ox/' That very afternoon when the 
home lessons were written upon the board 
to be copied by the pupils the following 
sentence in Burmese was set to be trans- 
lated into English : " There are six foxes 
in that field," and every boy in the class 
wrote in his exercise book that night, 
** There are six foxen in that field." Well, 
why not? If six oxes are six oxen, why 
should not six foxes be six foxen? 

Last week a boy in one of my classes 
said, ** He was a truly man." I corrected 
him, of course, showing that "true" was 
an adjective and ** truly " an adverb and so 
could not qualify a noun. The boy turned 
over a few pages of his reader till he came 
to this sentence, " Vaseo Nunez sent back 
all his sick and weakly men"; then he 
said, ** If a * truly man ' is wrong, why do 
you say a * weakly man'?" Then of 
course there had to be a long explanation 
to show the difference between *' weak " 
and ** weakly," a difficult thing enough 
when dealing with Burmese boys. 

There is one mistake which every West- 
171 



©J>D6 artO iBnDs trom iPagoDa XanD 

erner makes upon coming to the Orient. 
That is he tries to hurry natives, but it is 
of all mistakes the most fatal ; it cannot be 
done. Kipling, I think it is, wrote a poem 
once of a young man who came to India 
from England and tried to do this ; when 
he found it was an impossibility he worried 
— and finally was carried one evening at 
sunset to the cemetery, and the natives of 
India whom he had tried to drive (Western 
style) sat around the tombstone and smiled. 
A man in the Orient must remember the 
Oriental rendering of one of our own prov- 
erbs : ** Never do to-day what you can 
put off till to-morrow." 



172 



flUcMcal flni06(onari? Morft 



At even' when the sun was set, 
The sick, O Lord, around thee lay ; 

Oh, in what divers pain they met, 
Oh, with what joy they went away ! 



P^OTlEDICAL missionary work in Burma 
Ir^ H ^^^ never received the attention it 
I RjdffiiS I is entitled to. Our own mission 
(the American Baptist Missionary Union) 
has never been so much in favor of this 
special line of work as some other mission- 
ary societies, so that to-day but eight fully 
qualified medical missionaries are accredited 
to Burma, and of these, six are in the Shan 
department. Yet I know of no means bet- 
ter qualified to get in touch with the people, 
to allay suspicion, deaden opposition, and 
batter down prejudices. 

In Bhamo we have a little hospital, the 
" Bessie Richards Memorial," built in 
memory of a cousin of my wife, who 
started a Shan Mission Circle among the 
young women of the Nicetown Baptist 
Church, of Philadelphia, which has aided 
in our work for over thirteen years. It has 
175 



©DO0 anO JBnt>6 trom ipagoDa XanD 

two rooms each i8xi8, separated by one 
I2xi8 ; also a veranda 9 feet wide. The 
walls are made of bamboo plastered and 
whitewashed and the roof partly of corru- 
gated iron, partly of thatch. It has been in 
use for eight years, except when we were 
at home on furlough. 

Unfortunately we have never been able 
to have much of an indoor department. It 
costs a great deal of money to run a hos- 
pital, even a small one, and so we have had 
to content ourselves by using it simply as 
a dispensary or outdoor department. 

Every morning from six till nine the hos- 
pital is open and I attend to the needs of 
patients. Every person upon entering is 
given a ticket with a number written upon 
it in Burmese and English, and when his 
turn comes enters the south room where I 
see him and give medicine. A preacher is 
always in attendance ; every person that 
can read Burmese is given a tract and the 
preacher talks with patients waiting their 
turn. 

The dispensary is entirely supported by 
voluntary contributions ; no one is asked 
to give a pice, or a cent. A box is placed at 
the door with a notice that patients can 
place within it whatever they please. Then 
176 



fllcDical flQl00ionatB XlDlorh 

I make quite a large number of visits to the 
houses of the sick, and the money paid for 
these visits is added to that taken from the 
box. A great many people also bring pres- 
ents ; bananas, rice, Chinese hams, cakes, 
and scores of other things ; when they can 
be used in the dispensary they are of course 
so used, if not we take them ourselves or 
for the boarding department and place the 
amount to the dispensary account. 

During last year (1903), we received in 
this manner over seven hundred and sixty 
rupees (^256.00). This money paid for 
twenty-five thousand four hundred and 
forty-six prescriptions or dressings — the 
number given out during the year. Four- 
teen thousand two hundred and fifty-seven 
attendances at the dispensary were given 
and six hundred and eighty-nine visits made 
to patients' homes. Besides this one hun- 
dred and seventy-nine minor operations 
were performed, and ten major, the latter 
under ether. Six fractures were also re- 
duced, one compound and one double. Two 
jungle trips were made to reach desperate 
cases and three hundred and fifty-four daily 
clinics held. This constitutes an aver- 
age year's work and costs the Missionary 
Society directly about fifty cents. 
M 177 



®DO0 ant) J6nD0 trom iPagoDa XanD 

When at home I was often asked what 
diseases are the most common in Burma. 
Fever, malarial fever, without doubt is the 
most common, and is answerable for more 
deaths probably than any other one disease. 
People in America were so often surprised 
at this and would say : *'What! malaria 
kill people?" But Burman fever and 
malarial fever at home, at least in the 
Eastern States, are two very different 
things. 

Burma could not be improved upon, from 
the standpoint of a malarial bacillus, if it 
had been made to order. It is hot, there 
are vast jungles, a heavy rainfall during the 
monsoon, and lots of pools in which mos- 
quitoes can breed and afterward do their 
deadly work. It is simply impossible, with 
our present means, to kill off these mos- 
quitoes or destroy their breeding-places es- 
pecially in Upper Burma, and while this 
state of things continues there is no chance 
of stamping out malarial fever. 

Bhamo offers a fair example. There are 
in the city a large number of nullahs, or 
hollows, dry in the hot season but full of 
"dead** water in the rains. The water 
from the river also backs up into them and 
stays there just long enough to kill part of 

178 



/HbeDical /nbissionar^ "QClorft 

the vegetation with which they are cov- 
ered ; then the river falls, the rain ceases 
for a few days, and the sun comes out 
scorchingly hot ; what better paradise could 
a mosquito wish for ? 

Of course cholera pays us a visit almost 
every year. The first season I was in the 
country I spent at Toungoo in Lower Bur- 
ma, and there I saw my first epidemic of 
this terrible disease. At that time there 
were three American Baptist mission 
schools in the city — the Shan and Burmese, 
the Bghai Karen, and the Paku Karen. 

Cholera appeared as usual near bazaar 
and the news was of course brought to us 
immediately. The helpers were badly 
frightened and they had reason for their 
fears too. Cholera is a terrible disease 
and acts with great quickness ; it is also 
horrible to witness, but four hours being 
sufficient to reduce a strong man to a wreck 
with sunken eyes, shriveled hands, and 
upon the very verge of death. Dr. John- 
son, the Karen missionary, was upon the 
mountains, and so the work of looking after 
all three compounds fell to my lot. The 
Burmese school and compound were across 
the street from the house we were living 
in, separated from the Bghai Karen com- 
179 



Q^t>6 anD JBnt>6 from pasoDa XanD 

pound by a police station. Several sepoys 
died in this station-house, and this natu- 
rally added to the fears of the native Chris- 
tians. As I was new to the country and 
had never seen cholera before I felt worried 
and anxious too. 

Everybody knows that cholera comes, 
practically always, through contaminated 
drinking-water. Now, if the water supply 
could be kept pure, one might snap his 
fingers at cholera, so I hoped to be able to 
fight the disease because we had a good 
brick and concrete well in each compound 
and did not have to get our drinking-water 
from the river, providing also, of course, 
the children living on the compounds did not 
go to bazaar and get food not properly 
cooked, which had been made with germ- 
contaminated water. 

I called up a preacher from each com- 
pound and put all the children under their 
care, making them responsible. *' No child 
goes to bazaar," was the rule issued. I 
made a rigid inspection every day till I was 
relieved by Dr. Johnson, and had the satis- 
faction of handing over to him a clean com- 
pound. The S. P. G.*s (English Episco- 
palians) and the Roman Catholics suffered 
so severely that they had to close their 
1 80 



fnieDtcal flQigsionaris Wioi\{ 

schools and send their children home ; ours 
were absolutely free. 

When this epidemic was at its height the 
Chinese residents imported a special god 
to drive away the ** cholera devil." The 
Chinese, by the way, always suffer more 
from cholera than any other race in Burma; 
this being due to their abuse of opium. 
The **god" was a picture, mounted upon 
a kind of platform which was carried upon 
men's shoulders. Every evening at dusk 
the Chinamen went to the joss-house for 
their god, then it would be carried through 
bazaar, stopping before each house in which 
a person was sick or where a man had died. 
The bearers howled and yelled and danced 
before each of these places, while the picture 
rolled and tossed like a ship in a storm. 
Long strings of firecrackers were set off, 
gongs were beaten and pandemonium 
reigned — and the cholera went on. Often 
the very men who had helped to carry the 
god around at night would be carried to the 
cemetery next morning. 

We have just passed through an epidemic 
in Bhamo, and the means used by the 
Burmans to drive out the nats (spirits) 
which cause the disease were as crude as 
the Chinamen's. At dusk a small fire was 
i8i 



®t>t>6 anD J£nt>6 trom ipagoDa XanD 

lit before each house ; a piece of the clothes 
of the victim was burnt, and as the smoke 
ascended it was confidently believed the 
disease would leave the sufferer and follow 
the vapor toward the clouds. Men and 
boys beat tin cans, frantically yelling and 
screaming at the same time at the very top 
of their voices ; women seized brooms, and 
yelling as loudly as their husbands and 
brothers, brushed at walls and ceilings to 
drive out the cholera nats — and the next 
morning as I made my rounds to see cases 
taken sick during the night, I stepped 
over the ashes of the fires lit in vain the 
evening before. 

Long streamers made of thin muslin were 
tied to slender bamboos and fastened to the 
tops of trees ; Buddhist priests paid visits 
to different parts of the city and mumbled 
Pali words ; women went by scores and 
hundreds to trees in whose branches evil 
spirits are supposed to live, and prayed be- 
neath them, begging the nats to take pity 
and go away — and the epidemic went on. 
People laughed when I told them to boil 
their drinking water ; that, they declared, 
was the height of absurdity ; the disease 
was caused by evil spirits, not by foul 
water. 

182 



There is not so much surgery in Burma 
as one would expect. For one thing, there 
is so little machinery in the country that 
accidents, save broken bones from falls, are 
comparatively rare ; then too, the Burman 
dreads the knife. Sometimes, though, 
patients are anxious for an operation. 

A funny thing once happened along this 
line. A Kachin came to me asking for 
help. He was, without any doubt, the 
ugliest native I have ever seen. He had a 
harelip, and not only was his upper lip 
divided, but the fissure ran up into his 
nostril ; three or four fangs protruded 
through it also, and the roof of his mouth 
was cleft as well. 

After getting him upon the table I pulled 
out these horrible teeth and sewed the two 
sides of the fissure together, and the opera- 
tion proved later to be quite successful. 
Just before he was discharged he asked to 
look in a glass so that he might see himself; 
we got a small mirror and handed it to 
him. I have never, in all my experience, 
seen a man so tickled as was that Kachin. 
He twisted his face into the most horri- 
ble grimaces, first to one side, then to 
the other, **to see if it was mended good 
and strong *' ; then he grinned from ear to 

183 



©DD0 ?nD BnD6 trom iPagoDa XanD 

ear and rubbed his finger over the place 
where the fissure had been. Finally he 
asked one of his friends who was standing 
near for a little betel-nut, and after chewing 
it went to the railing of the veranda and 
spit the juice into the compound with great 
glee ; then he returned, looking as proud 
as a small boy in his first long pants, 
and said earnestly, **Just see, I can spit 
now ! I have never been able to do it 
before." 

He was then all haste to get over to the 
Kachin compound and show off his new 
good looks to friends. Mrs. Hanson, of the 
Kachin Mission, saw him, but before she had 
time to compliment him upon his changed 
appearance he cried : 

** Ah, I shall surely be able to get a wife 
now 1 None of the girls would look at me 
before. They said I was too ugly, but 
they cannot say that now ! " 

Any one can practise medicine in Burma. 
In fact, every white person has to, more or 
less. The servants come as a matter of 
course when they are sick and ask for 
medicine ; the scholars in the school have 
to be looked after also, and during jungle 
trips, santonine for worms, quinine for 
fever, cough mixture, and other simple 
184 



fHlcDical ^isstonarg Moth 

remedies are included in the jungle kit 
as a matter of course. 

Among native Burmese doctors there is 
no real knowledge of the cause of disease. 
They are ignorant of anatomy — even of a 
rudimentary sort — and the same can be 
said of physiology and hygiene. Medicines 
are compounded and given not only by the 
mouth and nostrils but are sometimes stuffed 
into the ears. I once saw a man trying to 
drive ** strength medicine" into a woman 
by placing it upon the top of her head and 
then blowing at it through his hands. 

Some years ago a man, a native of India, 
opened a shop in bazaar and posted a sign 
in Burmese, English, and Urdu, stating that 
he was an eye doctor and could cure every 
case of eye disease that came to him, even 
though the patient had been totally blind 
for years. Of course his shop was just 
thronged and, after bleeding every patient 
of all the money he had brought along, he 
took strips of paper upon which a verse 
from one of the Vedas had been written 
and pasted it across the forehead of each 
foolish dupe, telling them at the same time 
that these verses had miraculous power, 
strong enough even to bring back sight to 
blind eyes. 

185 



®DJ)0 anD J6nD6 trom ipagoDa XanD 

Talking of bleeding reminds me that 
bleeding in another sense, that of taking 
blood from the veins instead of money 
from the pockets of patients, is still prac- 
tised upon the Shan hills among the Ka- 
chins and, I believe, in some parts of hidia. 
The way a Shan doctor bleeds is to take a 
cleft stick in which has been tied a sharp, 
three-cornered piece of glass. This is used 
instead of a lancet. The patient stands 
erect and the surgeon selects a vein in one 
of the legs and, by holding his finger upon 
it and thus stopping the flow of blood, makes 
it become prominent. Then he spits upon 
the sharp end of his lancet and places the 
piece of glass upon the vein; then with a 
sharp blow from a small stick he drives his 
lancet into the vein and starts the bleeding. 
He once more spits on his instrument and 
operates upon another vein, so that when 
he is through the man will have sometimes 
as many as half a dozen little streams of 
blood slowly running down his legs. When, 
in the estimation of the doctor, enough 
blood has been extracted, he claps upon 
each wound a little plaster of leaves of a 
small lump of partly-chewed tobacco and 
thus stops the bleeding. As it is not 
thought necessary to wash the patient's 
1 86 



/nbeDical nilissionars mocft 

leg before operating nor the lancet either 
before or afterward, save for the spitting 
above referred to, and as both leg and 
lancet of course are dirty, it will not prove 
surprising to hear that many of these 
wounds suppurate and cause ugly sores. 

A very favorite application for wounds 
of all sorts is soot. Fires are made in 
houses upon a hearth and, as there is no 
chimney, the smoke escapes through the 
thatch roof and deposits a thick crust of 
soot upon the rafters. It is soot from these 
rafters that is used and, as it is greasy and 
sticky and is oftentimes plastered on with 
a liberal hand, it is very difficult to get it 
off so as to properly cleanse a wound in 
order to put a clean dressing on. In fact, 
in the case of burns, where the wound is a 
large one, it is impossible to cleanse it at 
one dressing ; one has to be content to 
** get off the worst of it " and trust to the 
softening influence of ointment to finish it 
next time. 

Burns, by the way, are very common, 
especially among children. As before men- 
tioned, fires are made upon a hearth, which 
consists of a square of earth a few inches 
thick, usually set in the middle of a room, 
with no protection around it. Cooking 
187 



Q^^6 anD :6nD0 trom iPagoDa XanD 

pots of hot rice or boiling water often are 
spilled over children, or the little ones trip 
and fall into the fire and burn themselves 
severely. 

Smearing over the wound with soot or 
grease is all that is done by way of treat- 
ment ; so that the wound, of course, is not 
only a long time healing, but what is worse, 
great scars are formed, which contract and 
cause terrible deformities. Arms are some- 
times joined to forearms. I have seen the 
leg fastened to the thigh for almost the 
whole of its length and the chin so bound 
down to the chest that the mouth could not 
be closed, while the eyelid had grown so 
fast to the cheek that it could not be shut. 

If the Burman is ignorant, the lower 
castes of natives of India are even more so 
and, what is worse, they are horribly dirty. 
It would be impossible for an American to 
understand or realize just how filthy they 
are. Their ignorance is not only appalling 
but sometimes heartrending. I remember 
just before I went home on furlough last 
time being called to the house of a sweet- 
meat seller living in bazaar. His son was 
very sick, he told me in his broken Bur- 
mese — would I not take pity on them and 
go and see him } I went, of course, but 
1 88 



fBlcWcal nilt66lonari2 Morlt 

when I saw the condition the poor child 
was in, used as I am to seeing horrible 
sights, it made me shudder. 

The boy had had a little sore upon his 
cheek, the father said ; he had scratched 
it and made it bleed. Of course the boy's 
fmger-nails were foul and he poisoned the 
wound, which spread and spread till it had 
eaten away all the flesh from one-half of 
the lower jaw and more than half of the 
upper. The father had applied medicine 
to the sore. He was a Hindu and therefore 
had great faith in cows, so he had taken 
some cow-manure, mixed it with a little 
lime and tobacco, and put that on the 
wound. 

A glance showed that it was impossible 
to cure the boy. The bones were lying at 
the bottom of the wound, perfectly white 
and bare, with no covering upon them at 
all ; but I hoped to be able to give the poor 
little fellow a few hours of comparative 
comfort. I therefore told the father that 
he must bring his son to the hospital right 
away and I went on ahead to get ready. 

The first thing I did was to send out for 

a cigar. Now, smoking is '* one of the 

things a fellow cannot do," as Kipling puts 

it — that is, if the fellow is a missionary, 

189 



©DDs anD BnDs from iPagoDa XanD 

and the native helper looked surprised 
when I made the request, but I knew the 
operation was a little too much on the 
dissecting-room order, and a good cigar 
would be a very comforting adjunct. I 
put the cigar in the end of a pair of artery 
forceps, so that I would not have to touch 
it with my fingers, and went ahead. Do- 
ing what .'* Why, taking live maggots out 
of that boy's face! They lay in the recesses 
of the wound, scores and scores of them — 
big, white, fat maggots — and when I had 
finished I found that I had filled a teacup 
one-third full. And yet people at home in 
America say, ** Why do you send medical 
missionaries to the East .? *' Why ? That's 
why! 

I was called once to a house not a hun- 
dred yards from the one last-mentioned, to 
see a woman who was supposed to be dying. 
Her husband came rushing into my house 
and assured me his wife was nearly dead, 
breathing her last, he said ; so although it 
was noon and the thermometer on the 
veranda registered one hundred and four 
degrees, I jumped on my bicycle and rode 
as hard as I could to the man's home. 

A little baby had been born to the woman 
that morning, and the custom in Burma is 
190 



^cDical fnli66ionan2 Morft 

that after a child is born, never mind how 
hot the weather may be, a large fire is built 
close beside the woman who is kept in a 
constant sweat for several days. If she 
should stop sweating for a moment there 
would be grave danger; in fact, death would 
speedily come. The unhappy woman had 
really fainted from pain and intense heat, so 
that a bucket of cold water thrown upon 
the glowing embers of the fire would have 
been the best treatment, sufficient to cure 
her in fact ; but according to an old hag sit- 
ting near, the real trouble was that every 
drop of blood in her body '* had ascended " 
to her brain and must be driven back again 
to its proper place in her body, or she would 
die and that in a few minutes. They had 
tried to drive it back, two or three said, but 
they had not been successful ; so that it 
depended upon me. If I could persuade this 
unruly blood "to descend" the patient 
would get well ; if not, well, then she would 
die. 

I took out my hypodermic syringe and 
gave her an injection, and in a few moments 
had the satisfaction of seeing her open her 
eyes, and soon after she was as comfortable 
as it was possible for any one to be in such 
a condition. I hardly know whether I should 
191 



®DD6 anC) )Bn^6 from paaoDa XanD 

say as comfortable as possible, for it was, 
as I have said, one hundred and four de- 
grees on our veranda ; I would hardly like 
to say what it was under that grass roof 
with the room packed to overflowing with 
men, women and children and babies, not 
to mention the great fire burning away in 
the middle. But there was something worse 
than that. 

There was a burning smell in the room, 
a strange smell like that of burning meat, 
so I asked one woman what they were cook- 
ing and advised them to look to it as it was 
being burnt and would certainly be spoiled. 
They looked surprised and said they were 
not cooking anything ; it was noon and 
" evening rice '* would not be put over the 
fire for several hours. 

I noticed that an old woman was holding 
something upon the patient's head, and 
when I asked what she was doing she said 
she was trying to drive the blood down. 
Just at that moment the woman took up a 
pair of iron tongs, and thrusting them into 
the fire, pulled out an earthenware pot 
about as large as a breakfast coffee-cup, 
which was red-hot. She took part of an 
old dress and dipped it into water, wrung it 
out, placed it upon the patient's head, then 
192 



fHleDtcal fmissionarg Work 

with the tongs she clapped upon that the 
red-hot chattie and kept it in place with a 
thick wad of wet cloth above all. Then 
the mystery of the burning flesh was made 
clear. It was not roasting pork as I thought, 
but the woman's head that was burning ! 
In the excitement the cloth beneath this 
almost red-hot chattie had become dry and 
the pot itself had burned through not the 
cloth only but the woman's hair, skin, and 
scalp, right down to the bone, and a few 
days afterwards there was a great, ragged, 
wound upon the top of her head as large as 
the palm of my hand, and I could touch 
bone with my probe wherever I placed it 
within the burned area. 

I am afraid this will be called a chapter 
of horrors, and so it is, I freely acknowl- 
edge, but if it is horrible simply to read of 
such things, what must it be to suffer them ? 
I have thus written to answer the question 
so often asked at home : ** Why are medical 
missionaries sent to Burma by the Chris- 
tian churches of America? " Why.? Have 
I answered that question to the reader's 
satisfaction.? 

There is no Good Samaritan in Buddhism 
or Hinduism either, and one sermon of 
works, relieving fever-stricken, pain-racked 
N 193 



®DD0 anD JEnD0 tcom ipaaoDa XanD 

bodies is sometimes worth a score of ser- 
mons merely preached ; at least, that has 
been my experience. 

It is often pitiable to see the dense super- 
stition in which people are buried, especially 
the women. Some months ago I was called 
to see the wife of a soldier, a Sikh woman, 
who was in a desperate plight. A baby 
had been born early in the morning and 
yet, although it was then getting dark, she 
was still in trouble ; the midwife, also a 
native of India, did not know what the mat- 
ter was, so they sent for me, and I found 
the woman had twins, and only one had 
been born. An operation was necessary, 
and she had been sick so many hours that 
when at last the second child was born it 
was, to all appearances, dead. Immedi- 
ately the midwife grabbed a brass dish in 
one hand and one of my instruments in the 
other and began banging them together, 
making a horrible din. I objected to my in- 
strument being employed in this manner, 
as she was pounding with it upon the edge 
of the dish vigorously, so I took it away 
from her ; but a stick of fire-wood was sub- 
stituted and the pounding continued in 
order ** to bring life into the child," as she 
explained. 

194 



jfflbeDical fHl(06tonari3 TlClotft 

Often at night as one passes through the 
city one will see a great glare of light which 
will be found to come from a number of 
candles, often several score, the reason for 
the illumination being that some person in 
the house is sick, and these candles are 
burnt as a sort of sacrifice in hopes of his 
being cured. 

At home the physician is expected to 
make a diagnosis of the case to which he is 
called ; here, however, the patient saves 
him the trouble, for he comes, knowing just 
what the trouble is, with a request that we 
give him **good medicine " to cure it. 

For example, here is a man who has come 
to the morning clinic at the dispensary. 
" What's the matter? " you query. 

*' I have a tumor," he says ; " sometimes 
it is small, sometimes large. It starts here," 
(pointing to the lower part of his abdomen) 
*'and it rolls around, rolls around, turning 
over and over till it reaches my throat, and 
then it feels as though it were about to 
choke me." 

This tumor pays not the slightest at- 
tention to anatomy ; things like the dia- 
phragm, lungs, and other organs, offer no 
obstruction to it ; it rolls along its course 
setting all anatomical knowledge at de- 
195 



©ODs anD )Bnt>6 from ipago^a XanD 

fiance. Of course, the man has no tumor 
at all, he has dyspepsia ; but to tell him 
that would make him think that you were 
not only ignorant but unsympathetic as 
well ; so you let him think he is harboring a 
tumor of the somersault variety, and try 
to cure his dyspepsia, and if you are fortu- 
nate enough to do so — a difficult thing 
enough — you cure his tumor at the same 
time. So you put up ''good medicine," as 
requested, in an old condensed -milk can 
which he has brought for the purpose, and 
he withdraws while you call out ** Next ! '* 

*' What's the matter with you ? " 

**0 saya, I have been sick a long time 
with pain all over my body." 

** Oh, yes, I remember, you came here 
some time ago." 

*'I did, sqya, and you gave me some 
medicine which cured it ; but I made a mis- 
take yesterday, and that brought all the 
trouble back. I ate some chicken." 

A Burman will eat hard-boiled rice with 
curry so hot it must taste like a political 
torch-light procession going down his throat ; 
with this he will take a little putrid fish and 
smack his lips over it, but should he be 
foolish enough to take a little chicken he is 
deadly afraid it will make him sick. 
196 



fnleDfcal HQtssionarg llClorft 

Another interesting thing. The kitchen 
of a Burman house has a floor made of split 
bamboos, and between its crevices — and 
there are sometimes more crevices than 
floor — all the refuse is thrown for the dogs 
and crows to eat, so that right beneath the 
house is a hole, always partly filled with 
stale water and decaying vegetable matter. 
This harms the Burman not a jot, but just 
let a native of India cook his food near-by, 
using ghee or native butter to fry it in, and 
every Burman that passes will cover up his 
face and nose to keep away the smell, and 
should they be attacked by any disease, 
from malaria to consumption or cholera, 
that frying butter is blamed for it. I re- 
member a woman — one of the members of 
our Burman church — assuring me that her 
child got fever from smelling food which 
was being fried in butter. 

Here comes a great scuffling from the outer 
room, then a native of India enters, comes 
stiffly to ** attention," raises his hand in a 
military salute with great unction, then re- 
treats quickly to the waiting-room and re- 
turns once more, this time piloting a movable 
bundle of clothes. It is not a ''tail figure 
all in white," but a short, squat figure all 
in white, which has to be guided as though 
197 



©DOS anO BnD5 trom iPaaoDa XanD 

it was about to play blind man's buff, and 
was being placed in position for the game 
to commence. 

Imagine a big sheet, in the center of 
which is a round hole about the size of a 
small tea-plate, laced back and forth with 
tape. Place this sheet so that the laced 
opening is squarely above her head ; make 
the garment long enough to trip her up in 
front, and drag upon the ground behind, 
and full enough to hang around her so that 
she looks like an equilateral triangle with 
the apex rounded ol^, and you have a good 
idea of what the wife of a Mohammedan 
native of hidia looks like when she rides 
abroad in a closed gharry (native carriage) 
which has had all the windows closely shut 
and a jealous husband opposite to her in 
the dark. 

From some hidden recess she pushes forth 
a hand, covered almost from wrist to elbow 
in thin, silver bracelets — that is for one to 
feel her pulse, difficult enough to do with 
the bracelets getting in the way, and yet 
that's all one has to go by in making a 
diagnosis, so far as physical signs are con- 
cerned, but by judicious questioning of the 
husband — the wife keeps silent or at most 
whispers out the answers to her husband 
198 



flUcOical nUiesionarg THUorft 

who repeats them, she never answers di- 
rect — one is able to strike a clue which is 
often sufficient to put one on the right tracl<. 
Some medicine is given, instructions are 
gone over two or three times ; her husband 
salutes again, grabs his wife by the elbow, 
turns her about-face, and out she stumbles. 
"Next!" 

The next is another native of India, but 
a very different sort of man from the last. 
He is a Hindu, and hates the Mohammedan 
like poison, and it may be said is hated by the 
Mohammedan quite as cordially. This man 
speaks beautifully ; his English is purer 
than many and many a person born in 
Boston or Philadelphia ; he has been edu- 
cated in an Indian university, perhaps, and 
so far as book learning is concerned, could 
hold his own with a graduate of any of the 
smaller American colleges. And yet, under 
this veneer he carries his old prejudices. 
How do you know ? Look at the bottle in 
his hand ; it is partly filled with water. 
What for } Why to mix his medicine with. 
He will not drink water from the pitcher 
you have been using all the morning. Why 
it would break his caste, or, as he puts it, 
"it is against the caste rules." This man 
who has studied logic in a university does 
199 



®DD6 anD BnDs tcom iPagoDa XanD 

not see the foolishness in supplying water 
to mix the medicine with, when at the same 
time he is willing to use the drug which has 
come out of a bottle from which thousands 
of doses have been given and which has 
been filled and refilled scores of times. 

This prejudice, for it is really nothing 
more, is a great difficulty in dealing with 
certain natives of India. They are forever 
parading their caste rules. They cannot 
do this, they cannot do that, they cannot 
do the other thing, because it is against 
their caste. They have no hesitancy in 
breaking these rules when it comes to a 
case of profit and gain ; they will cross salt 
water ; they will mix in business transac- 
tions with men of lower castes ; they will 
rub shoulders with them upon railroad cars, 
steamboats, in offices and in stores, and 
yet, every once in a while, they will spring 
these caste rules upon you in a most 
exasperating manner. 

Such a man comes to you for aid in the 
dispensary ; you give him the necessary 
medicine, then he says: *'What shall I 
eat ? " When I first came to Burma I com- 
menced in such cases to tell them what 
they should eat exactly as I would have 
told an American at home, but I soon had 

200 



firieDical nUissionacs Morh 

to stop that. For instance, I would say : 

** Take a little chicken broth and ," but 

before I could get any further the patient 
would make a little bow and give a slight 
shrug and say, " I am very sorry, sir, but 
I cannot take that, it is against my caste 
rules," and so one might go on saying this 
or that only to find out in the end that he 
could eat no animal food at all, with the 
exception, perhaps, of milk. Another man 
would consider the eating of a piece of beef 
a greater sin than murder ; another cannot 
eat beef but can eat mutton ; another can 
eat goat-flesh and chicken, but nothing else ; 
another man will not even drink tea because 
it is necessary to cook the water and that 
might kill some animal within it. So 
now, when a native of hidia says, ** and 
about diet ? " I always ask : ** Well, what 
can you eat, anyway ; tell me first, and then 
I will tell you what you can and what you 
should not "; this saves a great deal of time 
and bother too. Fortunately there is no 
caste among the natives of Burma ; he is 
not troubled about food, but is like the 
king's fool — eats anything that is good. 

This statement, however, should be 
qualified with reference to milk. Very few 
Burmans like milk. It "turns against 
20 1 



©DD0 anD EnDs trom iPagoDa XanD 

them" as the saying is, and a native of 
Burma feels about drinking milk much as 
an American would if ordered to drink 
warm blood. Milk is practically never used 
as an article of food, and when taken in sick- 
ness I have more than once seen it cause a 
violent diarrhoea, very difficult to control. 
Sweet, condensed milk, not diluted with 
water and drunk, but spread thick upon a 
slice of bread or a biscuit is regarded as a 
great dainty. 

It might be interesting to note in passing, 
perhaps, that comparatively few Burmans 
suffer from consumption, while natives of 
India who drink large quantities of raw milk 
often come to the dispensary with well- 
marked symptoms of this disease. There 
are, of course, many other causes to be 
taken into consideration ; but I am confident 
the drinking of unboiled milk is a great 
cause of this terrible disease. Of course 
the milk must come from a diseased cow, 
but in Upper Burma at least there is, so far 
as I have ever heard, no inspection whatso- 
ever of cow-stables or herds of milk-giving 
cows. But to return to the clinic. 

This time a Burman comes in leading a 
child by the hand. One glance at the poor 
little thing is sufficient to show how useless 

202 



fHleDical flQtssionac^ THUocft 

medicine is in her case. Both eyes are 
sightless, covered with thick, white scars ; 
the eyelids, without lashes, are thickened 
and drawn out of shape, and the child is 
quite blind. 

** How long ? " you ask. 

** Two or three years," replies her father. 

** Where do you live?" is the next 
question. 

** At Goon Kha," (a village a mile or two 
up the river). This man has known all the 
time about the dispensary in the city, so 
you ask : 

** Why did you not come before ? " 

**Oh," he replies, *' at first the child's 
eyes were so sore she did not want to come 
out into the light ; then afterwards I put it 
off from day to day and month to month 
till now." 

And thus it goes. Nep pin gah (to-mor- 
row) is the curse of Burma. " I will do 
it to-morrow," '* I will go to-morrow," 
always, always to-morrow, and so nothing 
is done that can possibly be put off till the 
next day. 

Some years ago I read a very clever arti- 
cle in one of the popular magazines, I forget 
which one — the *' Century " I think it was, 
but am not quite sure. It was written by 
203 



®0D6 anD jenDs trom ipagoDa XanD 

a young Japanese and was called Top- 
sey-turveydom ; it contrasted Japan with 
the United States, and the way things were 
done in Japan with American methods; but 
I often think Burma is quite as much upside 
down as Japan, in some things more. 

Especially is this true in cases of sick- 
ness. At home the patient is, of course, 
kept as quiet as possible. **The doctor 
orders that nobody is to see the patient " ; 
how often do we hear that at home ? 
In Burma, however, a sick-room is the 
gathering place of the community. The 
patient lies in the middle of the room upon 
his mat and is surrounded by friends, day 
and night, and the more dangerous the 
attack the greater is the gathering. Nor is 
it a quiet, orderly one. Everybody, men, 
women, and children chatter and smoke ; 
everybody gives his or her ideas as to the 
disease, its cause, and proper treatment ; 
there is bustle in preparing food for visitors 
that have come from a distance to see the 
sick man, and all is confusion. A more 
opposite condition to an American sick-room 
it is impossible to imagine. 

I once counted ninety people gathered in 
one house, almost all piled into one room, 
waiting for me to come and say what I 
204 



flDeDical flQissionars Morft 

thought of a case. The entire room in 
which the patient lay was filled to over- 
flowing with people sitting upon the floor, 
wedged together, their knees drawn close 
up under their chins to take up less room, 
and only a narrow lane left from the door 
to the mat in the center upon which the 
sick woman lay. Down this lane I was 
conducted to where, close beside the mat, 
stood a chair, ostentatiously placed ready 
for me to take my seat. It had been bor- 
rowed for the occasion, by the way, from a 
friend ; the people of the house did not 
possess one, but it is considered such bad 
form to ask a white man to sit upon the 
floor like a native that whenever I make a 
visit there is always a kalah tine (liter- 
ally, ** a thing a foreigner sits on ") ready- 
placed for my use. 

The poor woman was dying of consump- 
tion and it was necessary to examine her 
chest, which was done to the great interest 
of the crowd. A question addressed to the 
patient would be answered by perhaps a 
score of friends, and as they almost always 
disagreed it was difficult to sift out the truth 
from a mass of contradictory statements. 

Outside upon the veranda were piles of 
yellow robes, tins of biscuits and con- 
205 



©DOS anD BnDs from iPafloDa XanO 

densed milk to be offered to the priests in a 
near-by monastery. A feast was being 
cooked in the compound, part to be sent to 
the monastery with the robes and part to 
be eaten by the visitors. People were run- 
ning from pot to pot ; fires were crackling, 
smoke rising, children rushing hither and 
thither, their parents scolding at the top of 
their voices, and in the center of all, gasp- 
ing out her life, lay the poor patient in 
whose behalf all this was being done. 

The native of Burma is very hysterical 
and easily affected by surroundings or, as it 
is technically termed, ** suggestion. '* Then 
the crowding of the sick-room as I have 
already described with sympathetic friends, 
each pitying the patient and saying how 
sick he is and how much he suffers, 
heightens this influence. 

I have frequently been called by a man 
who, with tears in his eyes, has told me a 
person was dying ; I have reached the 
house and found a score of excited women 
leaning over the patient, calling her by 
name to come back and speak to them, 
while they tore their hair, screamed, and 
beat their breasts like distracted creatures, 
and upon a mat would be a rigid form, stiff 
and to all appearances unconscious if not 
206 



micDical rmtssionar^ Morft 

dead. It was, however, nothing but hys- 
teria, and the worst of the screamers having 
been sent out — much against their will, be 
it said — and the balance calmed and quieted, 
the apparently dead woman has before long 
been brought around. What a field for so- 
called ** Christian science ! " To cure some- 
thing that never existed — to use an Irish- 
man's phrase. But putting joking aside, 
although it is ** nothing but hysteria," such 
cases require a great deal of tact, in fact, 
more tact than medicine. 

The very first case I had in Burma was 
that of a woman said to be dying of hydro- 
phobia. I found out afterwards that the 
dog which had bitten her was not mad ; she 
thought it was, however, and that was just 
as deadly for she actually frightened herself 
to death — she died a few hours after I 
saw her. 

Upon the Shan Hills there is one kind of 
evil spirit which is supposed to live in the 
grass by the roadsides, and as travelers 
through the jungle pass by the place where 
it lies in ambush it utters a terrible scream 
and springs for the person's throat. If the 
traveler is wise he keeps his mouth shut and 
gets nothing but a bad scare, for the spirit 
flies off disappointed at the ill success of its 
207 



®&D6 anD jBn^e trom iPagoOa XanD 

scheme, but if, on the other hand, the man 
becomes so frightened that he opens his 
mouth to cry, the spirit seizes the oppor- 
tunity of popping into his mouth, darts 
down his throat and soon kills him. So 
great is the dread of these evil spirits and 
so firm is the belief that their entrance 
into a person's body is surely fatal that 
men who suppose themselves attacked 
really die. Their case is hopeless, they 
say, and they lie down and die of sheer 
fright. 

When a medical missionary first com- 
mences work he may be regarded with 
suspicion, but if he is at all skilful and 
conscientious and above all has tact and 
kindly feelings he soon wins the confidence 
of the Burmans. The last-mentioned char- 
acteristic, however, counts for more than 
all the rest, save, perhaps that of tact. 
Any man can be reached through his heart 
quicker, not to mention more satisfactorily, 
than through his brains ; and the Burman, 
the Kachin, the Shan, and the Hindu are as 
other men in this respect, and their con- 
fidence once gained it is given freely. Some- 
times, in fact, it is almost embarrassing. 
For instance, I once had a man brought to 
me with an eye that looked like a raisin ; he 
208 



had been blind forty years, he told me, had 
had an arrow shot into it when he was a 
boy, but a friend whom I had cured had 
assured him that that did not make any 
difference, I could cure him, and what was 
more, could give him a new eye. Poor 
fellow ! he went away a very disappointed 
man. His friend had heard, I believe, of 
artificial eyes, something, however, I did 
not have in the dispensary. The artificial 
eye, through report, had probably grown 
into one that could see. 

Speaking of artificial eyes makes me think 
of a Shan preacher I used to have. This 
man had an artificial tooth and often mys- 
tified the jungle people by opening his mouth 
and showing them that he had a straight 
row of teeth, then by rubbing his hand 
over his lips, he could make the tooth dis- 
appear and reappear at will. I used often 
to think of the story of Rider Haggard — in 
** King Solomon's Mines," I think it is — 
where a man saved his life by taking a set 
of false teeth in and out. Our preacher was 
as proud of his artificial tooth as a peacock 
with two tails, but alas, pride goeth before 
destruction, this time not merely in a figura- 
tive sense, for that tooth was simply worn 
out by taking it in and out showing off 
209 



®DD5 anD J£nt>6 from iPagoDa XanD 

before admiring friends, and the last time 
I saw the preacher there was a woful 
gap between his teeth and their artificial 
companion was no more. 



210 



if 



mats," "IHpcas," anb Cbarms 



VI 



*'NAT" (Shan hpea), is a Bur- 
mese word, the meaning of which, 
as given in Doctor Judson's dic- 
tionary is, ** A kind of god, a being superior 
to man and inferior to Brahmas, some of 
whom inhabit the inferior celestial regions, 
and others have dominion over different 
parts of the earth and sky." 

Belief in and fear of these nats or evil 
spirits is universal throughout Burma. In 
the case of hill tribes, such as the Kachins 
and the Karens, it is the only religion they 
possess, if such a belief can be dignified by 
the name of religion ; but even with the 
Burmans, although they are Buddhists, the 
fear of these spirits is almost as great, and 
offerings are constantly made to them. 

An officer in the police, then stationed at 
Toungoo, in Lower Burma, told me the 
following anecdote : He had in his service 
an orderly, a Shan, who had been in the 
police department for years. Shortly be- 
fore he told me the story the officer had 
been at a small village a few miles north of 
213 



©DD0 anD J£ntf6 tcom iPagoDa XanD 

Toungoo, where there were several prison- 
ers, and as there was no prison there it was 
necessary to bring them down to the city 
by train. They were securely handcuffed 
in pairs and entrusted to this old Shan or- 
derly, who went with them aboard the 
south-bound train. 

Now, if this old man had been content to 
simply take his prisoners safely to their 
destination, and deliver them to the jail 
officials as ordered, all would have been 
well, but he was very fond of what a friend 
of mine calls "frills," and wished to im- 
press upon the minds of the unfortunate 
prisoners under his care what a smart man 
he was. He had often seen conductors — 
guards they call them in Burma — drop off 
the train without waiting for it to stop, and 
he thought that by following their example 
he would be able to show how clever he 
was and how used he was to traveling by 
train, so while the cars were still in motion, 
just as the train pulled into the station, he 
turned his face toward the rear car and 
gave a tremendous leap. 

The poor old policeman was encumbered 
with a sword, several bundles, and an earth- 
enware chattie^ and when some coolies stand- 
ing near had helped the would-be great 
214 



**1Flat0," **lHpea0," atiD Cbarms 

man to his feet, had picked up his sword 
and bundles, some of them from the track, 
he looked at the pieces of his earthenware 
chattie ruefully, whilst he rubbed a bump 
upon the back of his head with one hand, 
and with the other stanched the blood 
flowing from his nose. 

He swore the other policemen to silence, 
but the joke upon the poor old orderly was 
too good to keep, and before long not only 
had it been told to the balance of the men 
at their village post, but the story reached 
the ears of the inspector, who demanded 
why he had done such a foolish thing 
as jump off a train in motion. The old 
man, however, was ready with an excuse. 
Putting on a look of great wisdom, he 
replied : 

**My lord, you must understand that 
many, many years before the English came 
to Burma there was a great nat, one of the 
greatest in our country, that had his habi- 
tation in a large tree near the gate of 
Toungoo. This tree was cut down to make 
way for the railroad, and the nat, to his 
great disgust, was obliged to seek a new 
home. Your lordship will, of course, un- 
derstand how angry the nat was at such 
treatment, and he determined to revenge 
215 



Qt>t>6 anD lBnt>s trom iPagoDa UanD 

himself upon people who rode in trains 
whenever he had the chance. To this end 
he follows the trains for many miles, and 
often seizes unfortunate passengers and 
throws them off the cars. 

" This was what happened to your slave. 
I was standing upon the platform of the car, 
just getting ready to alight when the train 
should stop, when this nat seized me by 
my two shoulders and threw me violently 
to the ground. Your slave is but a man, 
and when a demon seizes his shoulders, as 
this one did mine, what is he to do ? Be- 
cause of this, although I broke the sheath 
of my sword, tore my jacket, and raised a 
bump upon my head, which feels as big as 
a cocoanut, I do not feel that I have dis- 
graced myself or have done aught to be 
ashamed of." 

These evil spirits are supposed to cause 
sickness. A man falls sick, and his friends 
believing the sickness is caused by a nat, 
offer gifts beneath a nat tree. Shans usually 
paint a bamboo or two white, and place them 
beneath the tree. If this does not work a 
cure presents of a little greater value are 
offered, such as betel-nut, a few bananas, a 
little boiled rice, or even a little tobacco, 
and in severe cases a small house made of 
216 



bamboo, or a zayat, is built beneath the tree 
in which the nat is supposed to live. 

If this is not sufficient to coax the evil 
spirit out of the sufferer's body there re- 
mains one other expedient, that of driving 
him out ; and Buddhist priests are called 
upon to do this service. Usually a small 
platform, raised a foot or so from the ground, 
is built of bamboos or anything that comes 
readily to hand. It is covered with mats, 
most of which have been borrowed from 
friends, and a curtain is hung up at the 
rear of the platform to shield the priests 
from the wind. Plants and flowers are 
oftentimes arranged to make an effective 
setting, and last of all, but not least by any 
means, betel-nut boxes are placed handy, 
together with dishes full of large cheroots. 
This is done outside the house in full view 
of everybody ; in fact, all the neighbors 
join in and help ; practically everything in 
Burma being done on the co-operative plan. 

At evening the priests put in an appear- 
ance. A small boy bearing an immense 
palm-leaf fan follows each, and each priest 
takes his place upon the platform, sitting 
upon the mats spread for his comfort, and 
retiring behind his fan is supposed to be 
soon lost in meditation. After a while they 
217 



©DD0 anD BnDs from iPagoOa 3LanD 

begin chanting texts and passages from the 
law, while the oldest men and women in 
the quarter devoutly count their beads and 
* make hay while the sun shines ' by wor- 
shiping the holy men, and thus lay up a little 
merit which will always come in useful. 
At length the priests rise and stalk back 
to their monasteries followed by coolies 
carrying the gifts from the friends of the 
patient. 

A sort of witchcraft is closely allied to 
the belief in nats. Burmans believe that 
nails, bits of leather, pieces of bone, rags, 
and other things can be conjured into a 
man's body by an enemy aided by a witch. 

I remember a carpenter with a phlegmon 
of his hand coming to me for treatment 
soon after my arrival in Bhamo. The 
whole hand was much swollen ; he had had 
no sleep for several nights, and was com- 
pletely worn out with pain and want of 
rest. I persuaded him to let me open his 
hand, and after a large amount of pus had 
been evacuated I called our Karen nurse to 
dress the wound. Two openings were 
made so as to secure good drainage, and in 
flushing out the cavity from which the pus 
had been drained, a large mass of stringy 
tissue protruded from the lower wound. I 
218 



told the nurse to seize this with a pair of 
dressing forceps, which she did, and gently 
pulled the mass out. The carpenter looked 
at it attentively for a moment or so, then 
he said : 

** Ah, I knew somebody who had owed 
me a grudge had put something in my hand 
to make it sore and there it is, sure enough ; 
now I shall get well quickly." 

Some of these spirits live in banyan 
trees, and beneath their spreading branches 
may often be seen model houses, model 
zayats, and the plates which have held 
offerings of rice and other food. 

A young British officer told me a good 
story about a nat tree. He was in charge 
of a post on the Shan Hills, and close to his 
fort a rifle range had been ordered built. 
As the district was very mountainous the 
site selected was the only available one for 
some miles. He noticed that a fine, large 
tree was growing close to the three-hundred- 
yard line, and as he was a lover of nature 
he decided to let the grand old tree stand 
till the range was finished, and not cut 
it down till the very last minute possible. 
The butts were therefore built ; the range 
laid out and leveled ; the different distances 
measured off, and everything ready for the 
2ig 



®DD0 anD BnDs trom iPasoDa XanD 

inspection of his superior officer, save the 
felling of the tree ; then he reluctantly 
gave orders that it was to be chopped down. 

Near-by was a Shan village, the residents 
of which had taken great interest in the 
leveling of the range, the building of the 
butts, the measuring, etc., but at the first 
blow of the axes against the great tree 
they came rushing out of their houses like 
a swarm of angry bees from a hive and 
drove the coolies off. 

Then the young officer discovered that a 
nat, or a hpea as the Shans called him, 
lived in that tree, and dire results would 
happen should it be cut down. 

This put the young man in a very un- 
enviable position. Government money 
had been expended upon the range and yet 
it was useless with a big tree blocking up 
the way ; upon the other hand, chopping it 
down would surely raise a riot and he was 
afraid of being hauled over the coals if that 
happened. What was he to do ? He 
thought till his head ached and he felt like 
kicking the Shans, his men, and himself ; 
but with all his thinking he could see no 
way out of his difficulty. He was just 
about ordering out a party of sepoys to 
protect the coolies while chopping down the 

220 



tree, this course appearing to be the less 
evil of the two, when a baboo, a native of 
India, who had lived in Burma many years, 
waited upon him and told him that for a 
consideration of fifty rupees he thought he 
could settle things satisfactorily to every- 
body. 

The money was gladly given. The 
baboo put half of it in his own pocket, 
then taking the balance he made a visit to 
the house of the heng or headman of the 
village. He impressed upon this man the 
fact that the great Indian government cared 
naught for such little things as hpeas or 
demons, never mind how much the Shans 
might dread them ; that when that govern- 
ment gave an order it must be obeyed, 
hpeas or no hpeas, and that if his people 
tried to prevent the chopping down of the 
tree, his lordship, the officer in charge, 
would call out a party of troops to guard 
the coolies, and in that case, if they still 
persisted, somebody would get hurt. 

Upon the other hand, the government, 
and the officer too, was kind, and did not 
wish to bring ill-luck upon the villagers by 
destroying the tree and thus making the 
nat angry, and he finally asked if there 
were not another banyan tree near at hand 

221 



Ot>oe anD JEnDa from ipagoDa XanD 

which was not honored by having a nat 
dwelling within its branches. Could not 
the headman prevail upon the hpea to shift 
his quarters ? 

This was a happy thought, but the head- 
man was not very sanguine upon this point. 
There were, of course, other trees, ban- 
yans too, in which no hpea resided, but 
still, the thing was against custom ; it had 
never been done before ; they must make 
a feast and that would cost money ; the 
villagers were very poor too. 

Here at last was the baboo's chance, one 
too good to be lost, and when the artful fel- 
low brought forth twenty-five rupees and 
said this great sum could be used in buying 
necessaries for just such a feast, the horizon 
became distinctly brighter. The headman 
took the money and promised to call nat 
doctors and priests from the great city near. 
They came, of course ; rice and curry was 
cooked, not to mention other good things, 
and so people came in crowds from city and 
villages, all eager to see his lordship the 
hpea change his quarters. 

A procession was formed, the men in the 
lead carrying a beautiful little sedan chair 
made of bamboo strips. Under a tree a 
few hundred yards away a cute little house, 

222 



also made of bamboo strips, had been built. 
His lordship was asked to graciously permit 
his most humble servants the honor of car- 
rying him from his old residence to the new 
one which he was assured was much better. 
He consented — at least the headman said 
he did ; anyway, drums were beaten, gongs 
were banged, and the procession marched 
from one tree to the other and nothing 
dreadful happened the next morning when 
the coolies chopped the tree down ; the 
only conclusion possible, therefore, was 
that the headman was right and that his 
lordship the hpea had consented to vacate 
in favor of the Indian government. Thus 
are Orientals governed. 

Some of these nats are supposed to spend 
their time in guarding lakes and tanks. 
Thirty years ago. Doctor Gushing, the sen- 
ior Shan missionary, but at the time of this 
writing president of the American Baptist 
College in Rangoon, and Mr. Kelly, a prom- 
ising young missionary, were traveling in 
the Southern Shan States. Having been 
without fresh food for some time, Mr. Kelly 
upon arriving at a small lake took his gun 
in hopes of getting a shot at a bird. He 
was fortunate enough to bring down a wild 
fowl but it fell into a lake just beyond his 
223 



©DD0 auD BnDs ttom iPagoDa 3LanD 

reach. He was about to pull off some of 
his clothes to swim out and secure his bird 
when the coolies that accompanied him 
crowded around begging him not to do so. 
They said a hpea guarded the lake ; a very 
wicked specimen too, and he would be so 
enraged at a man's first of all shooting a 
bird near his domains and then capping 
everything by swimming into the lake to 
get it, that the white foreigner would surely 
be pulled under by the angry spirit and 
drowned before their eyes. 

Of course the young American laughed 
at such a fairy-tale as that, and tossing 
aside his coat entered the lake. He took a 
few strokes and had almost reached his bird 
when he suddenly threw up his hands and 
disappeared beneath the surface of the 
lake. 

The bravest deed I have ever heard of 
a native of Burma doing was done then. 
Among the followers was a man named 
Ing Tah. He had been born and raised 
amongst the superstitions of his people, of 
course — he was a Shan — and although he 
had become a Christian a few months 
before, there must have been in his heart, 
without a doubt, a great dread of the evil 
spirits he had been accustomed to fear and 
224 



worship since his childhood, and yet this 
man bravely volunteered to enter the lake 
and dive for the body of the young mission- 
ary. He dived several times, and each 
time he disappeared the other coolies con- 
fidently expected him to share the fate of 
the white man, but at last he discovered 
the body and found also that the feet had 
become entangled in some water-plants 
growing upon the bottom. 

The young missionary was buried near 
the bank of the lake in which he had lost 
his life, and Doctar Gushing had to return, 
bearing the heavy tidings to his young 
widow in Lower Burma ; a sorrowful jour- 
ney surely. A small tree was planted at 
the head of Kelly's grave and twenty 
years after, when the writer visited the 
place, the sapling was found to have grown 
to a tree of mighty girth, a landmark for 
miles across the plain. The story of the 
white man's death has passed into the his- 
tory of Shan country, and every man 
knows of the American teacher whom the 
hpea dragged to his death beneath the 
waters of Naung Se Wit. 

In a former chapter I have told of the 
journey I took with my sick wife from 
Mongnai ; it may not be uninteresting, per- 
P 225 



©DJ)6 anD J6nD0 tiom pagoDa XanD 

haps, to tell the cause of her sickness from 
the Shan standpoint. 

Poor food had really more to do with it 
than any other one thing ; it was at that 
time impossible to get fresh meat in bazaar 
except at rare intervals, although meat 
from animals which had died a natural death 
was to be had almost every bazaar day ; 
the people at first would not even sell us 
chickens because they feared that we 
would kill and eat the chickens and their 
late owners might in some manner receive 
part of the punishment meted out to people 
guilty of taking animal life. We were 
therefore husbanding our store of canned 
goods, as we knew it would be impossible 
to replace them during the rainy season 
then upon us. Under the circumstances I 
thought it might prove a good plan to try 
and get some fish. The river did not look 
at all promising, and after trying it I found 
it justified its looks. After a couple of 
hours' patient waiting I did not get a single 
bite. Just south of the mission compound, 
however, was a tank in which I had seen 
quite a number of fish and so I determined 
to try my luck there. 

I had hardly thrown my line into the 
water before I noticed a number of men 
226 



who had been bathing at the lower tank 
come running toward me, calling to their 
companions as they came, and before many 
minutes had elapsed the entire coping around 
the tank upon three sides was lined with 
men and women, although they seemed to 
shun the side upon which I had taken my 
seat. I was then new to the country or it 
would not have been necessary for me to 
ask why they stared at me so, but at that 
time I had no idea what the attraction was, 
so I said : 

** What are you looking at ? " 

*' We are waiting to see you go into the 
tank ! " answered a man. 

** Go into the tank ? Why should I go 
into the tank } " I asked. 

*' Because the hpea will pull you in," 
they cried in chorus. 

This was a good chance to talk, so I told 
them that if a man was a Christian there 
was no need to fear hpeas. ** You say 
your hpeas are strong," I continued, ** but 
I will now show you that I am stronger. 
Now wait and see." 

They did wait and, what is more, they 

confidently expected to see me go toppling 

over into the tank sooner or later and meet 

the same fate that poor Kelly had met 

227 



©OD0 anD JBnt>3 trom IPagoDa XanD 

twenty years before, and they went away a 
very disappointed crowd of men and women. 

That afternoon my wife was taken vio- 
lently sick and it became necessary to get 
her home as quickly as possible. The 
news spread through the city like wild-fire, 
and every wiseacre shook his head and 
said, ** I told you so." They believed that 
the spirit had sent this punishment upon us 
instead of drowning me in the tank. This 
was the universal verdict. 

Some time ago, Doctor Henderson, who 
relieved me at Mongnai, had a case of ap- 
pendicitis and told the patient that she had 
the same trouble as ** Mamma " Griggs had 
had. The woman was scared almost to 
death and protested most solemnly that she 
had never fished in the tank. One exam- 
ple was quite sufficient, she declared, and 
no man or woman would risk life in doing 
such a foolhardy thing as that, especially 
when fish was so cheap in bazaar. If 
the hpea would punish a white man so 
severely, what, indeed, would be the 
punishment meted out to a Shan ? 

One of the most curious places, if not 
the most curious place in which a nat is 
supposed to live is in the front part of an 
ox-cart. 

228 



I remember soon after coming to Burma 
that a party of us took a journey from the 
railroad far into Shan country. All our 
goods came in the train from Lower Burma, 
and I was busy a whole morning bargain- 
ing with ox-cart men at the station to take 
us about a day's journey, at the end of 
which we would transfer our goods to 
mountain-carts or, rather, carts with oxen 
used to mountain travel. 

After the bargain was completed the load- 
ing began. Practically everything we had 
had been packed into coolie baskets, each, 
with its contents, weighing five viss (about 
eighteen pounds), so that these baskets 
took up a great deal of room in the bottom 
of a cart and yet made a very light load. 

Some small bundles and baskets had 
been left over and there was a good deal 
of squabbling among the cartmen as to 
where these baskets should be placed. 
They jabbered and talked as only Burmese 
cartmen can jabber and talk, and after a 
while, seeing they appeared no nearer a 
settlement of the dispute than at first, I 
snatched up one of the baskets from the 
ground and placed it on one of the carts 
just a little forward of the place where the 
driver would afterward take his place. It 
229 



®OD0 anD Bnt)0 trom iPagoDa XanD 

was only a small basket and the man would 
have been able to see over it and yet sit 
comfortably and drive his oxen easily at 
the same time. 

As I placed the basket on the cart every 
man jumped to his feet and cried out ex- 
citedly that I must remove it or not a man 
would "follow." I was astounded for a 
moment or two, but then I remembered 
how complex are their customs ; that a 
man cannot do this or that or the other 
thing, although in Western eyes it may 
appear trivial or unimportant, so I asked 
what the trouble was. 

The head coolie, a Shan, then said, 
** Teacher, there is not room for that basket 
there." 

'*Not room!" I cried; "what do you 
mean by * not room ' } There is plenty of 
room. The cartman can sit behind it. It 
does not come up to his knees. He can 
see over it and be comfortable." 

" It is not a case of the cartman's being 
comfortable," replied the coolie, "but of 
offending the hpea." 

While the coolie had been talking to me 
the cartman had lifted the basket from his 
cart and placed it upon the ground. Then, 
turning toward me, he said : 
230 



**1Flat0,'' ^'Mpeas,'' anD Cbatms 

** If the teacher does not know I will tell 
him. Just in front of the driver's seat lives 
a nat who guards the cart. If we feed him 
before we start on a journey and do not 
crowd him he remains good-tempered, but 
if we were to place that basket where you 
wanted it to go it would incommode him. 
He would become angry and play all sorts 
of tricks upon us. The cart would break 
down before we had gone a mile ; the oxen 
would fall sick ; we would all get the fever ; 
in short, bad luck would arrive for every- 
body and everything in the caravan. No, 
the basket cannot go there." 

It was, of course, no use arguing, so the 
contents of three or four carts had to be 
rearranged to make room for the trouble- 
some baskets before we could start on our 
journey. 

These inquisitive busybodies of fairies 
interest themselves even in the building of 
houses. The first building put up under 
my care was at Mongnai, in Shan country. 
The post-holes were dug, the bottom of 
each post was burned to make it bitter and 
protect it from white ants, and the next 
thing in order was to raise it. 

I went out early one morning to see the 
carpenters do this, and the first thing I saw, 
231 



®DD0 anD BnOg trom pagoDa XanD 

close to the house-site, was what looked 
like a little table with tall legs, made of 
bamboo, and upon it was placed a little rice, 
with a few bananas and a little betel-nut. 
A small bunch of bananas was tied with 
rattan to the top of each post as it lay upon 
the ground all ready to be hoisted into 
place. 

I called the head carpenter — a Shan, of 
course — and asked him what these bananas 
meant, and he answered that they were an 
offering to the hpeas, and assured me that 
if something of the kind was not done the 
nails would turn to worms between their 
fingers, the hammers and hatchets would 
mash and cut their fingers, the posts would 
fall and crush them and other disastrous 
things would happen, all brought about by 
these miserable hpeas. 

A Westerner may perhaps smile at such 
superstition and say " How foolish ! " Of 
course it is foolish, worse than foolish, but 
the carpenters believed it — hpeas were very 
real beings to them — and what is more, 
every man in the country, from one end to 
the other, except the Christians, shares 
their belief. The Burman is as superstitious 
as the Shan. I found that out when, years 
afterward, I started building the Bessie 
232 



**inat0,'' *'1Hpea5/' anD Cbacms 

Richards Memorial Hospital in Bhamo, for 
the Burman carpenters acted in exactly the 
same way. 

When the schoolhouse — also in Bhamo 
— was built, as it was a much larger and 
more expensive building, and as the gov- 
ernment had made a grant in aid of it, 
Chinese carpenters were called, and as the 
first post went up the Chinese contractor 
set fire to a circle of little candles he had 
previously placed in the ground, while in 
the quarters of the carpenters close by, a 
whole bunch of punk incense-sticks smoked 
before the shrine of their spook ancestors. 
And so it goes throughout the whole country 
from China to the sea. 

These nats and hpeas have an unfortu- 
nate habit of being revenged upon persons 
that have unwittingly provoked them. If 
a man meets misfortune the nats are often 
blamed for causing it. If the hens do not 
lay or if eggs mysteriously disappear after- 
ward it is because some nat has been 
offended and is now taking his revenge, 
and so on through an endless succession of 
petty trivial troubles. 

Anything that is out of the ordinary is 
easily explained by attributing it to a nat. 
A phonograph is a nat. Some Burmans 
233 



©OD0 anD EnDs tcom ipagoDa XanD 

from a jungle village once came to hear our 
graphophone. Of course they were aston- 
ished, and when they heard songs, bands, 
solos, and choruses all come out of one 
trumpet, they decided that a nat was inside 
and did the talking. Even when we pro- 
duced a record and explained that a Burman 
had sung into the horn, and endeavored to 
make the method plain to them, they shook 
their heads and said it could be nothing but 
a nat ; nothing else would have sufficient 
wisdom to do such a marvelous thing. 
There was no getting around such reasoning 
as that, so we gave it up. 

The highest flattery a Burman can give 
is to call a person a nat. Sometimes after 
a difficult operation, after the patient has 
been etherized, after a great gaping wound 
has been made, after this has been sewn 
up and the patient come out of the ether, 
they have asked him : ** Did you feel no 
pain, none at all, none whatsoever.? " and 
when the patient has assured them he felt 
nothing, they have shook their heads and 
said : " Your lordship is not a man, you are 
a nat." Higher praise than that they could 
not give. 

The question is sometimes asked, " Are 
there no good nats } " 
234 



** Oh, yes," the natives say, ** there are 
good nats as well as bad, just as there are 
good men as well as bad. But you see they 
do not hurt us, and so we do not bother 
about them ; we do not feed them. What's 
the use .? It would be just that much good 
food or money's worth thrown away; so 
we feed and worship the bad ones only in 
hope that we will be able to keep them 
from getting angry with us, and to concili- 
ate them should we be so unfortunate as to 
make them angry." 

Besides these common everyday nats 
there are others, much more terrible but 
rarely met with. They are, indeed, the 
bugaboos of our own childhood days. The 
worst is an awful spirit with a dragon's 
head, the claws of a vulture, the wings of 
an eagle, and the body of a lion ; a com- 
bination capable of considerable action, and 
if the tales told about them in the folk-lore 
of the Shan hills are to be relied upon, they 
act up to their powers. Their food is hu- 
man flesh and a good deal of it. Then there 
is the beeloo, a giant as tall as a palm 
tree. This being rejoices in a dog's face 
with fangs as long as an elephant's tusks. 
He does not walk or run, but jumps, spring- 
ing a quarter of a mile at each leap, some- 
235 



®D06 anD JBnt)3 tcom IPagoDa XanD 

times bounding even further wlien in chase 
of a plump man or woman upon whom he 
has his eye. 

Fortunately for the inhabitants of the 
mountains these breeds seem of late years 
to have become as extinct as the dragons 
of Greece or the giants of Ireland, and their 
only use now appears to be to fill up im- 
portant parts in stories, the drama, and 
decorations to monasteries, except, per- 
haps, to scare disobedient children, a state 
of affairs eminently satisfactory, especially 
to fat and chubby children and young vir- 
gins for whose tender flesh, in years gone 
by, these monsters appear to have had a 
great fondness and an inordinate appetite. 

The belief in and fear of nats, hpeas, 
and kindred spirits, is really the old religion 
of Burma which Buddhism has never sup- 
planted, and when one leaves the plains 
and ascends the hills one finds that the 
further he travels the less hold Buddhism 
has upon the people and the greater the fear 
of nats, till, upon the borders of China, and 
among the Kachins, Chins, and other hill 
tribes, it constitutes, as before mentioned, 
the entire religion of the people. Idols are 
not to be seen ; monasteries with their yel- 
low-robed priests are left behind, and in- 
236 



stead nat priests, nat altars and the remains 
of nat feasts are universal. 

Still, even among the Shans, who are big- 
oted Buddhists, so great is this fear that I 
have frequently seen men, clad only in cot- 
ton trousers and cotton jacket, sit shivering 
upon the ground, or sleep shivering upon a 
sheet of coarse paper by way of a bed, and 
nothing above them but a thin cotton 
blanket, while there was white frost upon 
the ground, and yet close by, lay broken 
boughs and branches, just the stuff to make 
a good roaring fire with, and yet they lay 
unused. Why? Because a hpea was sup- 
posed to live in the tree they fell from, and 
not a coolie dared collect an armful to make 
a fire. Such is the bondage in which the 
people, especially the hill people, live. 

Closely allied to the subject of nat-wor- 
ship is that of charms. The native of 
Burma has a vast number, and he places 
implicit faith in them. A tragic example of 
this occurred a few years ago in Mandalay. 
A Buddhist priest proclaimed himself to be 
a prince and relative of Thebaw, the last 
king of Burma. He also claimed to have 
the power of making his followers invulner- 
able by means of charms which he tattooed 
upon their bodies, so that if necessary they 
237 



®DD6 anD lSnt>6 from iPagoDa 3LanD 

could become invisible to their enemies; 
swords could not wound them, and bullets 
aimed at them would turn to worms. Un- 
fortunately he was able to gain such an 
ascendancy over a number of men that 
they consented to assist him in storming 
the palace, so that he could seat himself 
upon Thebaw's throne, after which they 
confidently expected that every white man 
would flee the country and the old Burman 
rule be restored. 

Fort Dufferin, in which the palace is 
situated, at that time contained a battalion 
of English troops, a whole regiment of 
sepoys, and a mountain-battery (native 
troops), and yet these foolish Burmans, 
armed only with swords and spears, rushed 
the gate of the fort and killed a soldier, a 
woman, and an onlooker or two. Of 
course, they were speedily overpowered. 
Some were shot, some were afterward 
hanged, and some were sentenced to long 
terms of imprisonment, but such is the 
faith of Burmans in such men as this priest 
that another would have comparatively lit- 
tle trouble to raise followers, and he would 
be believed in and followed as readily with, 
unhappily, the same results ; unhappily, 
that is, so far as his dupes are concerned. 
238 



One of the strangest of charms is used 
in Shan country. It is supposed to make 
the person submitting to it invuhierable in 
the time of battle ; it is supposed to enable 
him to climb a banana tree without causing 
it to bend beneath his weight, and confer 
several other wonderful powers. 

The person wishing to possess this charm, 
together with a nat saya (nat doctor), goes 
into the jungle, where a hole is dug in the 
ground. The man stands in this hole and 
the earth is then filled in all around him up 
to his neck, so that nothing is visible but 
his head. His friends then cut down a long 
bamboo, split it lengthways, and by knock- 
ing out the joints, make it into a gutter. 
Four sticks are also chopped down and 
fastened together in two pairs in the shape 
of an X. These are used as supports to the 
split bamboo, at one end of which the soya 
stands, and the other is put into the patient's 
mouth. 

The nat doctor then goes off by himself 
into the jungle where he prepares some 
*' medicine," the ingredients of which are 
a profound secret. This medicine is made 
up into balls, about the size of a boy's 
marbles, and are rolled, one after another, 
along the split bamboo into the man's 
239 



®DDa anD JBn^e trom ipagoOa ILanD 

mouth. He must bolt each one as soon as 
it passes his lips ; if he chews one bolus the 
good of the charm is immediately destroyed. 
After all the medicine has been taken the 
man is freed from his prison and goes on his 
way rejoicing, quite confident that it is not 
possible to wound him by any weapon made 
by man. 

The commonest charm in Upper Burma, 
perhaps, is the needle charm. A common 
steel needle is broken in halves; the skin 
of the arm is pinched up between the 
thumb and fmger, and the pointed end of 
the needle is thrust beneath the skin. 
Usually these needles, being small, do no 
harm ; they become lodged parallel with 
the muscles or between them, but occasion- 
ally they work their way close to a joint 
and then cause trouble as they then inter- 
fere with its action and have to be cut out, 
which is sometimes quite a difficult thing to 
do ; they are so small it is often difficult to 
locate them exactly. 

Upon the Shan hills one often sees m.en 
with small black lumps along the neck, in 
front of the large muscle just to the side 
and behind the wind-pipe. These are 
pieces of silver and range from the size of 
a pea to a small bean. A slit is made in 
240 



**1Flat0/' **Mpca0/' anD Cbarms 

the skin, the silver, beaten flat and smooth, 
is slipped into the cut and worked with the 
fingers away from the wound which is then 
allowed to heal up. The silver is, of 
course, often dirty, and this causes inflam- 
mation in which case the wound becomes 
foul and the silver sloughs out leaving be- 
hind it an ugly scar. 

Some years ago I found in the school- 
room a square piece of tin, ruled with lines 
forming smaller squares and crossed by 
other lines at an angle. There were some 
strange characters scratched upon it also. 
I asked one of the boys what it was, and 
after a good deal of hesitation, for he 
seemed ashamed to tell, he said that it 
was a charm made to hang around the 
neck, and would protect the wearer in a 
fight by preventing his being shot or cut. 

Of course I laughed at it and the boys 
did too, but I could see that even in spite 
of years of teaching in a mission school, 
all of them, even the teacher, had a sneak- 
ing sort of faith in it. Then I asked them : 

** If you hung this around your neck and 
a man were to shoot at you, what would 
happen ? " 

** Oh, the bullet would swerve, it would 
not go straight," replied a boy ; he was a 
Q 241 



©DD0 anD JBntfS trom iPagoOa XanD 

new pupil and firmly believed in what he 
said. 

** Come into my study/' 1 said, "and 
we will put this wonderful bit of tin to the 
test." 

A dozen boys came crowding in ; then 
I went to a corner where an air-gun was 
leaning against the wall, and loaded it. 
The boys all knew that the weapon would 
kill at a score of paces, so holding the gun 
in my hand, I said : 

** Will any boy put this charm around 
his neck and let me fire at him ? " 

No ; nobody was willing, so I laughingly 
asked why. If this would protect them, as 
they declared it would, why should they 
be afraid to put it to the test ? One 
boy replied that the charm itself was all 
right, but perhaps they might have been 
guilty of making some "mistake," which 
would undo all the good and take away 
the protection which would otherwise be 
afforded by the charm. 

"Very well," said I, "then we will fasten 
it up on this post and make believe that it 
is a robber chief. Now look out." 

I hung the bit of tin on the post as I said 
this, stepped back a few paces and fired. 
Crack ! I had missed, and the slug had 
242 



**1Rat0,'' **1Hpea0,'' anD Cbarms 

struck the post an inch or two above the 
charm. 

A murmur of excitement ran through the 
crowd of boys, and I overheard one say, 
" There, I told you ; you see it is impossible 
to hit it." 

** Wait a minute there ! " I cried. ** I aimed 
a little too high, and yet I missed it by but 
an inch. If that post had really been a 
man he would have been killed, without 
the shadow of a doubt." 

The tin was not more than three inches 
square and I am a very poor shot, but at 
the next trial the pellet went clean through 
the very center of the charm and stuck in 
the post behind. 

** Now, what would have happened if 
that had been a real man instead of a post ? " 
I asked. *M tell you an American gun, 
even an air-gun, will beat a Burmese charm 
every time." 

I gave the gun to each boy in turn, and 
each took a shot at the charm, and by the 
time the last boy's turn came it was as 
much riddled as the battle-flag of a Grand 
Army post, and what was more to the point, 
every boy, even the newest, ridiculed the 
power of the charm ; in their eyes it was 
then nothing but a square of tin with every 
243 



Qt>^6 anD iSnDd ttom ipagoDa XanD 

bit of virtue pounded out of it. It was a 
good object-lesson, worth a score of simple 
exhortations. 

The question might perhaps be raised 
here, suppose a man submits to having a 
charm tattooed upon him, or buys a charm 
made of tin, silver, or gold, and afterwards 
gets hurt, why that does not destroy the 
faith of himself and others in similar charms. 

The answer is that it takes but a very 
little " mistake ** to destroy the virtue of a 
charm, and if such a man should complain 
that he had been cheated, as the charm 
was ineffectual, the vendor would simply 
reply, "You have made some 'mistake' 
and destroyed its virtue ; the charm itself 
is all right, and if you had not made the 
mistake would have protected you ; the 
fault lies with you yourself." 

For instance, should a man walk under a 
house, a bridge, or any structure at all, 
over which a woman has previously walked, 
that act would destroy the virtue of every 
charm he had about him. 

I know a missionary in Burma who had 
a hospital of two stories in height, and 
wondered why nobody would enter the 
lower floor, till after a long while he dis- 
covered that the natives were afraid to 
244 



'*1Flat0t'' **1Hpea6/' anD Cbatms 

enter the bottom room although they were 
willing enough to go upstairs ; they feared 
for their charms. 

Charms are sometimes used in case of 
sickness and are then tied around the wrist, 
arm, or leg of the patient ; but I have an 
impression that this custom has been de- 
rived from India. A few strands from the 
tuft of hair which grows at the end of a 
cow's tail, twisted around the arm of a sick 
person is without any doubt at all an im- 
portation from India, where the cow is 
worshiped by Hindus. Often one sees a 
small packet tied around the wrist of a per- 
son sick with fever. If one of these packets 
should be opened it would be found to con- 
tain a small piece of paper, upon which 
lines have been drawn at right angles with 
each other so as to form squares, sometimes 
with other lines crossing diagonally ; some- 
times the lines are drawn so as to form a 
hexagon, and in each of the compartments 
is a Pali word written in Burmese char- 
acters. In case of an abscess or phleg- 
mon, especially of the hand or foot, these 
charms are tied to prevent the inflammation 
ascending the limb. 

The fortune-tellers deserve to have a 
little notice taken of them here, for they do 
245 



Qt>t>3 anD l&nDa from iPa^oDa XanD 

a great trade in Burma. ** When in doubt 
consult a fortune-teller," is the rule. There 
are lucky and unlucky days for everything. 
Fortune-tellers are consulted not only in 
all great crises, but for small things as well. 
A man who was born upon a certain day of 
the week can commence an enterprise 
upon a special day with a mind at ease, 
for he knows it will be successful. Should 
he, however, commence it upon an unlucky 
day he would assuredly fail. 

A strange difference between the customs 
of East and West comes in right here. At 
home everybody knows the year and the 
day of the month upon which he was born, 
but few know the day of the week. Now it 
is exactly the opposite in Burma. The Bur- 
man knows the day of the week, nay, the 
very hour when he first saw the light, but 
could not tell you which month it was, or be 
exact as to the year. You ask a man how 
old he is. ** Oh, I am about thirty-five or 
thirty-six, I don't know exactly,'* he will 
answer. In Shan country a man's very 
name depends upon the day of the week 
on which he was born, certain letters of the 
alphabet being set apart for each day, and 
the name must commence with one of those 
special letters. 

246 



There appears to be a certain virtue in 
raw tea, for it enters into a great many 
ceremonies. When a person wishes to 
consult a fortune-teller he takes with him, 
in addition to the fee demanded for the in- 
formation wished, a small amount of raw 
tea. It is necessary to tell the fortune- 
teller the day of the week, the hour, and 
if possible the very minute of his client's 
birth, also the star under which he was 
born, and which is supposed to influence 
his life either for good or ill. 

The fortune-teller then proceeds to con- 
struct a horoscope and calculates profoundly 
while doing so. There are seven ** houses," 
and after the horoscope has been drawn 
he repeats several charms and Pali texts, 
touching each point as he does so much 
as in the children's game of " Dicory, dicory 
dock," and the point upon which the finger 
rests at the close indicates whether the un- 
dertaking will be lucky or unlucky. The 
rules are very complicated and have been 
received, in large measure, from India. 

I have known a man put off digging the 
post-holes for his house from week to week 
because the fortune-teller said that every 
day was unlucky ; once even a surgical 
operation was postponed a whole day, 
247 



®DD0 anO BnDe trom iPagoDa QLanD 

although the case was a desperate one, 
because the day was not a lucky one for 
bringing a man down a river. The patient 
was a Buddhist priest and lived in a mon- 
astery a few miles up the river. 

One day I went to see a case in bazaar. 
The patient was a girl, and it was necessary 
to operate upon her. It was on a Thursday 
that I saw her for the first time, and as 
there was no special hurry about operating, 
I said to her mother: **Now to-day is 
Thursday ; I cannot operate to-day nor to- 
morrow, Friday, but if you bring her to the 
hospital on Saturday morning I will perform 
the operation." 

"Very well," replied the woman, *'I 
will bring her as you say," then turning 
toward a preacher who had accompanied 
me, she said : " Thursdays and Fridays are 
unlucky and Saturdays are lucky days with 
the teacher, I suppose," and then I had to 
laboriously explain that it was not a case 
of lucky or unlucky days, but that I had 
to teach for several hours a day in school 
on five days of the week, and therefore 
when a case was not urgent or promised to 
be a tedious one, I sometimes postponed it 
till Saturday when I did not have to teach 
in school and therefore had more time. 
248 



A few days ago the head master told me 
that four new boys, two Burmans and two 
Mohammedans, were coming that day to 
join our school. They did not put in an 
appearance, however, and when three or 
four days passed I concluded that they were 
like so many other boys whose parents say 
they will send them, but put it off and off 
from day to day and week to week, till 
finally the boys get too old. At noon to- 
day, however, I saw the four boys enter 
the compound with their parents, and when 
I asked the head master why they had not 
come before, he smiled and said, ** This is 
the first lucky day," so that it is necessary 
to have a lucky day even to enter a mission 
school. Let us hope that they will be wiser 
when they leave it. 

In the Chinese joss house in Bhamo is a 
certain idol which is accredited with the 
power of being able to advise its votaries 
which will be a lucky day for caravans to 
set out on their return to the Flowery King- 
dom. Pig-tailed mule-drivers and travelers 
consult it very often and abide by its de- 
cisions. It is customary to give a fee to 
the priest in charge of the temple in return 
for the information, and the manner of set- 
tling the amount to be paid is a unique 
249 



®Dt)6 anD J6nD6 trom pasoDa 3LanD 

one. Upon the floor near the idol is a large 
joint of bamboo, like a wooden jar, and 
within it are a number of thin strips of 
bamboo marked with Chinese characters. 
The traveler kneels upon the floor and 
shakes the jar vigorously, till one of the 
strips falls out and he then pays the amount 
marked upon it. But when is not John Chi- 
naman thrifty ? Some are marked with a 
trifling amount, some with quite a fair sum, 
and it is the former class which shows the 
most wear and tear, for if the traveler sees 
that a strip bearing a large sum upon it is 
about to fall out, he stops his shaking and 
the strips settle back again ; then he re- 
commences the shaking, and by dint of 
elbow-grease and a little twisting, manages 
in time to drop out the coveted strip with a 
small amount marked upon it. 



250 



Zbc IReUglon of tbe people 




VII 



HERE are two kinds of Buddhism 
— tlie Buddhism of European and 
American scholars, and the Budd- 
hism of the people of Burma. The former is 
totally foreign to the Burman, and should 
any reader wish to study it he can take his 
pick of a score of learned books on the sub- 
ject ; but the religion therein contained is 
a very different one from the Buddhism 
one sees in the everyday life of the people, 
and it is of this latter kind of which I shall 
tell a little. 

Almost the first question asked at home 
when speaking of the religion of Burma is, 
** Do these people really and truly pray to 
idols made of stone ? '* and in spite of the 
books above referred to, in which it is 
claimed the people do not worship the idols 
themselves, but worship Buddha through 
them, the answer must be, if honestly 
answered, ** They do." 

Any day one may go to Mandalay and 
watch men carving idols. They are blocks 
of stone, nothing else, when they enter the 
253 



©DOS anD JBn^s from pagoDa XanD 

shops, and what is more, they are still blocks 
of stone when they leave ; after having been 
carved and polished and ready for use, they 
are idols— ^j^o^ too, and it is not till they 
have been anointed and proper ceremonies 
held over them that they become gods — 
payah. It should also be noted that the 
men who carve these idols do not gain 
merit by so doing ; it is their business ; it 
is the man that buys them and sets them 
up in a monastery or pagoda that gets the 
merit, not the carvers. 

One of the saddest sights in Burma, but 
alas ! one that can be seen any day of the 
week, is to see a mother with her child in 
an idol house. The child is often scared 
at the great, white, solemn idol and screams 
with fright, trying to run away into the 
bright sunshine outside, but the mother 
makes it kneel before the god, and teaches 
it how to place its hands together and 
**shikko," while it repeats after her the 
formula which a Burman goes through while 
worshiping before idols. Then the mother 
sticks an incense stick or a lighted candle 
before the image, or offers some other small 
offering and then with her child goes away, 
satisfied with having gained ** merit " for 
herself and her little one. 
254 



tTbe IReliQion of tbc people 

Children, and grown-up people too, fear 
these idols. It is absurd to say they re- 
gard them as ** figures " only. 

The sister of one of our schoolboys had 
had several children, but each one had 
been born dead, and for three months before 
the last one was born she spent a good part 
of her time going from pagoda to pagoda 
and from idol to idol, praying that her baby 
might live. She ran her husband into debt 
with the offerings she made to the priests 
and the idols. 

One of the teachers in the school told me 
that a few days ago he noticed a schoolboy 
in a monastery compound ; the boy was 
looking around as though trying to see 
whether he was being watched, and think- 
ing himself safe, he picked up a stone and 
threw it at one of the idols, saying as he 
did so, " Eh, you are nothing but a big 
lump of stone after all I " He was much 
disconcerted when, upon turning around, 
he found the teacher smiling at him, for as 
the former said, it looked very comical to 
see the boy throwing stones at an idol as 
though he was more than half-afraid in 
spite of his words. The boy put a bold 
face on the matter, however, and stoutly 
maintained "that he was not frightened at 
255 



©DOS anD BnDs trom ipagoDa XanD 

all." Mission schools, if they do nothing 
else, teach boys that stones are stones, 
whether they have been worshiped or not. 

I recall a case which closely approaches 
the grotesque. The Shan preacher once 
came into the dining-room while we were 
at breakfast, saying that a man from a 
jungle village a few miles up the river was 
waiting upon the veranda. He had come 
to ask me to go and see a ** hurry case '* 
in his home. I told the preacher that I 
would go, and he returned to the man with 
the message, but to his great surprise he 
found the villager upon his knees, with his 
hands clasped reverently before his face 
praying away as hard as he could. 

" What are you doing ? " asked the 
preacher. 

" I am praying to the teacher's god," 
replied the man. 

The preacher thought that perhaps I had 
an image of Gautama somewhere as a 
curio, and so looked around the shelves, 
but seeing none, he replied, ** There are 
no idols here." 

" Why, yes there is ; there is one right 

on the table with a silk umbrella over it," 

replied the man, pointing with his finger to a 

small round table in the middle of the room. 

256 



^be IReKQion ot tbe people 

** Do you know what that thing is ? " 
asked the preacher. 

'* A foreign god," replied the man 
promptly. 

**God, eh?*' grinned the preacher, 
" that's no god ; the teacher does not 
worship idols ; that's a lamp ! " 

"A lamp!" repeated the man incredu- 
lously. ** Whoever heard of a lamp with 
an umbrella of red silk over it .? There is 
an image there, anyway." 

" It is a lamp for all that," persisted the 
preacher. ** See, here is where you put 
the match in lighting it." 

" So there is ! " replied the man in great 
astonishment ; ** well, it is the most 
wonderful lamp I ever saw; in truth, I 
thought it was the teacher's idol which 
he worshiped." 

So far as I know, that lamp is the only 
one extant which has been worshiped as a 
god. It was of bronze, and the body was 
the figure of a boy holding up the lamp 
itself, which was covered with a large shade 
of red silk. 

The man was very disappointed to find 
he had not gained much after all by praying 
to **a foreign god." 

One thing must always be kept in mind, 
R 257 



Ot>t>6 an^ Bn^s from iPagoDa Xan& 

and that is that the Buddhist worships a 
dead god. Gautama Buddha, the last in- 
carnation, was a king, but gave up his 
crown and his palace, gave up even his 
wife and children to make his home in the 
jungle where he ** became enlightened " as 
his worshipers put it, but one day he ate 
too many mangoes ; this brought on an 
attack of cholera morbus and he died — 
went to Nigban, was annihilated, or to use 
a Burmese figure, ** If you were to put a 
match to a piece of paper it would burn up, 
wouldn't it ? The smoke vanishes utterly ; 
well, that is Nigban." Therefore the Bur- 
man does not worship a God — a great, lov- 
ing, tender Father as we do — neither does 
he worship the stern Law Giver of the 
Jews ; he worships the goodness of a man 
who died two thousand years ago. 

Buddhism is utterly pessimistic. It con- 
demns but does not aid ; it punishes but 
does not offer any practical way of escape. 
The Shans have a proverb: "As surely 
as the wheels of the cart follow the oxen 
drawing it, so surely will punishment follow 
crime. If you sin you will be punished," and 
there it stops. It is as cold and unsympa- 
thetic as the stone idols which represent it; 
beautiful undoubtedly, but dead. 
258 



Zbe IRclfgion of tbe people 

Of course there is merit which a man can 
earn as an offset to the consequences of his 
guilt ; but merit is always the unknown 
quantity in the equation, and it is always 
insufficient too. 

Buddhism is practically a debit and credit 
account between heaven and a man's soul, 
with an overwhelming balance upon the 
wrong side. Men's sins count against 
them ; the merit they are able to gain 
counts for them. To gain this merit men 
build pagodas and monasteries ; they make 
feasts ; they do pious acts ; they buy idols 
and pray before them and make offerings 
to them and the priests. Every cold season 
the traveler in the jungle sees thousands of 
Shans wending their way from the hills 
towards the plains. Ask them where they 
are going and they will tell you to Man- 
dalay, and if their money holds out, to 
Rangoon afterward. Why .? To worship 
and gain merit. They go. You see them 
a few weeks afterward going back home 
and ask them, ** Did you see the gods ? " 
** Oh, yes, we saw them." ** Did you 
gain a great deal of merit?" "Yes." 
** Enough to take you to Nigban when you 
die ? " They will smile and yet shake 
their heads sadly at the same time. Not 
259 



©ODs anD J£nt>6 trom iPagoDa XanD 

enough. In more than a dozen years I 
have never seen one single person who 
would acknowledge that he had gained 
enough merit to counterbalance his sins 
and shortcomings and take him to Nig- 
ban, the goal of his ambitions, the land of 
annihilation. 

When a priest dies the correct thing to 
say is, ** His lordship has gone to Nigban," 
but everybody knows the saying is nothing 
more than a polite fiction, and that not 
even a priest can gain enough merit to take 
him there. 

You see the Burman believes in the doc- 
trine of transmigration, and thinks that 
when he dies his spirit is immediately re- 
born, as an animal, another man, or a nat, 
according to the amount of merit he has 
acquired, but unfortunately when one life 
has ended the effects of the bad deeds 
committed during it do not end, but he 
carries the balance of demerit with him, 
and enters upon his new life just that much 
to the bad, and this goes on accumulating 
and accumulating — no wonder he feels he 
will never reach Nigban. A good re-birth, 
/. e., being born a good animal, is the most 
he can expect, and not always even that. 

1 often smile when I remember what an 
260 



tibe IReUgton ot tbe ipeople 

old Shan once said to me. He came to the 
dispensary rather late one morning, and as 
it happened to be a busy day, he had to 
wait till at least fifty other patients who 
had arrived before him had been attended 
to. He saw each in turn come into my 
room and receive medicine or have a wound 
dressed. It happened also that it was 
necessary to perform three or four minor 
operations that morning, so that he was 
considerably impressed. He came from a 
jungle village and everything was new to 
him, so that when his turn came he showed 
plainly that he was pondering deeply upon 
something pretty weighty. He told me 
his trouble and I gave him some medicine, 
then as he took the bottle he looked up in 
my face with a serious air, and said : 

"Teacher, you have done many merito- 
rious acts this morning, do you do thus 
every day.?*' I nodded. *' Attend to as 
many people?" he asked. ** Sometimes 
more, sometimes less," I said. Then he 
rose to go, but before he left the room he 
turned back and said, ** Teacher, you are 
gaining a wonderful amount of merit by 
giving away all this medicine. You will 
surely get a good re-birth when you die. 
Why," he concluded, more earnestly than 
261 



®DD0 anD 3BnD6 trom ipagoDa XanD 

ever, ** I would not be surprised if you were 
re-born an elephant ! " 

When a Burman dies his friends mourn 
as **one without hope/' for they feel they 
will never, never see him again. There is 
no hope of meeting, even in a distant time, 
as with the Christian. I remember once 
at Mbngnai standing by the side of a man 
who had been gored to death by an ele- 
phant. His mother was kneeling at his 
side upon the ground, screaming, tearing 
her hair, and beating her breast, crying that 
her son, her only son, had gone from her 
forever and that she would never see him 
again. 

I looked at the people gathered around, 
and then I said : 

" You believe that this man had a soul, 
don't you ?" 

They chorused assent, so I continued, 
** Where is it now ? " 

** Where is it now ? Where is it now ? " 
they echoed, looking at me in great sur- 
prise. Then one of their number, an old 
man, said, *' Teacher, that is a strange 
question to ask ; one good to marvel at. 
How can we tell where his soul is ? He was 
a pretty good boy ; he obeyed his mother ; 
he did not steal nor smoke opium, and so 
262 



V^bc IReltgton ot tbc people 

we hope he has gotten a good re-birth, but 
we cannot tell into what animal his soul has 
entered. Who can ? " 

No, they could not. At that very mo- 
ment his soul might have commenced a 
new stage of existence in the body of a 
peacock, an elephant, or a horse — a good 
re-birth — but upon the other hand he was 
much more likely to have fared worse, and 
might be a toad, a snake, or even an earth- 
worm. As they said, ** Who can tell.?" 
Mystery, all was mystery and darkness as 
deep as death itself. 

About ten years ago a woman living in a 
village in Upper Burma lost her son from 
cholera. A few days later while passing 
through another village a few miles distant 
from her own, she saw a calf, upon the face 
of which was a mark closely resembling a 
birthmark upon the face of her dead 
son. She found out that this calf was born 
upon the same day that her son had died, 
so she immediately seized it and took it to 
her own house, declaring that it was her son. 

The owner of the animal, a native of 
India, of course objected to this line of 
conduct and went to the headman of the 
village, asking him to order the woman to 
bring back his calf. The headman called 
263 



®DD0 anD BnDa trom iPagoDa XanD 

the woman, but when he heard her story he 
declared that there was no doubt that her 
son had been re-born in the body of this 
calf, and that she was doing a merito- 
rious act in caring for it ; in this opinion 
he was backed up by every elder in the 
village, and the woman went on her way 
rejoicing. 

But alas, her joy was but short-lived, for 
the native of India went to the city and 
entered suit in a court where the magis- 
trate was a white man, and of course when 
the case came up for trial the owner of the 
calf won and the Burman woman was or- 
dered to return it immediately. But this 
she flatly refused to do, and when the police 
went to her house to bring away the 
calf by force, every villager rose to help 
her and the police were driven away, a 
regular riot taking place, so that it was 
necessary to call sepoys, armed with rifles 
and bayonets, to restore order. 

Buddhism can be summed up in the 
homely parable of the man who tried to 
lift himself from the ground by pulling 
upon his own boot-straps. And yet, in 
some ways, it appeals to a man's self- 
pride. If he progresses at all it is by his 
own unaided efforts. He can say with 
264 



TLbc IRcltflfon ot tbe iPcoplc 

the king of old, " Is this not the great 
Babylon which / have built ? " 

Then there is so much parade and show. 
The Burman does not believe in ** not 
letting his left hand know which his right 
hand doeth " ; upon the contrary he lets 
the whole neighborhood know it, and gains 
their applause. ** He has his reward," 
surely. I know of no more self-satisfied- 
looking man than a Burman who is about 
to make a large offering, dedicate a monas- 
tery or pagoda, or build an idol house. 
There is always a long procession, practi- 
cally everybody in the quarter taking part. 
Drums, gongs, flutes, and bamboo clappers 
are much in evidence, and in the center of 
it all, walking along in dignified silence 
amidst the noisy procession, with a white 
linen turban tightly twisted around his 
head, stalks the ** benefactor." Anyone 
that has seen such a procession appreciates 
more strongly than ever Christ's order, 
'*And when thou givest thine alms sound 
not a trumpet before thee as the hypocrites 
do" — the Buddhist not only sounds a 
trumpet, he calls a whole band to advertise 
his good deed. 

Every boy in Burma becomes a priest. 
A great feast is made, friends conduct the 
265 



©Dt)0 anD BnDs trom iPagoDa XanD 

boy beneath a golden umbrella to a monas- 
tery, his head is shaved, and other cere- 
monies are gone through, but it is often 
nothing more than mere form. Custom 
demands that a boy become a priest; it 
does not demand, of course, that he re- 
main one, and so once in a while one of our 
schoolboys will ask leave of absence from 
school, and when you ask why, he will 
reply, ** I am going to be made into a 
priest.** The permission being given, at 
the end of a week he returns to school 
with a shaved head, his father is deeply in 
debt, but otherwise there is no difference 
in the boy or his family. He wore his hair 
a certain way before he was " made into a 
priest** ; he will wear it differently when 
it grows again, that is all. 

For a boy not to become a priest, at least 
for a day or two, is a greater disgrace than 
being sent to prison. We had a boy in our 
school who became a Christian, but of 
course he was a minor, and so I told him 
that he must get the consent of his parents 
before he was baptized. But here came a 
hitch. He had never been a priest, and 
his parents said he must be made one before 
they would allow him to be baptized. This 
the boy refused to do, and so a deadlock 
266 



^be IReltQion ot tbc I^eoplc 

followed which lasted for some months. 
Finally, chiefly through the influence of his 
grandmother, the consent of his parents 
was gained and he was baptized ; but the 
family "felt the disgrace keenly." 

Burma, like every other country, has 
her roll of Christian martyrs, although it is 
not so long as some others. When the 
Portuguese empire in India was at its 
height, Roman Catholic priests were sent 
to Pegu. A small church was built, but 
the Burman king, suspecting treachery on 
the part of the priests, raided it and burned 
it to the ground, everybody within being 
killed. 

A few years before the war which re- 
sulted in the annexation of Upper Burma, 
one of our Christian natives was killed in 
Mandalay. Who has not heard of Judson 
who came so near giving his life in the 
prison outside Ava ? It is true that he 
escaped with his life, but he was to all in- 
tents and purposes a martyr. There are 
a few people still living who remember 
seeing him, the ** apostle to the Burmans," 
and I have noticed that when they, or any 
other natives for that matter, talk of Judson, 
they say, **Why years afterwards you 
could see the scars left by the sores which 
267 



®DD6 anD BnDs trom ipagoDa XanD 

the chains wore into his legs ! " Ah, those 
scars preached eloquent sermons. It is the 
sufferings he endured, and the losses— his 
wife laying down her life and he almost 
doing so — that appeal to the people of 
Burma, even down to to-day. Surely ** the 
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the 
church " ; it always has been and always 
will be. 

Fortunately, under British rule all per- 
secution worthy of the name, has been 
done away with, but a man has still to 
endure a great deal if he steps out from 
the religion of his fathers and embraces 
Christianity. We cannot understand just 
how great the wrench must be, either, to 
break away from life-long customs and be- 
liefs. It is because of the fact that it is so 
much easier for a young person to do this 
that schools have proved so great a suc- 
cess, and yet even young people must face 
a storm, oftentimes a terrible one, when 
they decide to be baptized. 

I remember a young man who had been 
a pupil in one of our mission schools in 
Upper Burma. He said he was a Chris- 
tian but feared to face the opposition from 
his friends, especially his mother, who was 
very devout and went each night to wor- 
268 



Zbc IReltsion of tbc people 

ship the idols and the priests. He came 
from his native place to Bhamo, and of 
course I became interested in him. I talked 
with him seriously time and again, but 
although he acknowledged that I was right, 
and that he ought to come out boldly and 
be baptized, he could not screw up suffi- 
cient courage to go contrary to the wishes 
of his mother. 

At last, one night, just as I was getting 
ready to go to bed, I heard a commotion on 
the veranda, and upon going out I saw this 
young man and one of our teachers. I 
thought somebody was sick and that they 
had come for medicine, and so asked what 
the matter was, but judge of my surprise 
when he replied, ** There is nothing the 
matter, I have come to be baptized ! " 

** * Come to be baptized ! ' " I repeated. 
** What do you mean by coming in this way 
late at night and saying you wish to be 
baptized ; you have not been accepted by 
the church even.'* 

Then he explained that his mother had 
gone away to a village a few miles down 
the river to see a sick friend, and he wanted 
to go out into the jungle somewhere where 
nobody would see him, and be baptized 
before she returned. 

269 



Ot>t)B anO iBn^B from iPagoOa XanD 

** And when she comes back, what 
then?'* I asked. 

** Oh, I intend keeping it a secret ; I will 
say nothing about it to her, that is why I 
want it done in the jungle and at night." 

** We do not want any such members in 
our church," I said. ** If you are afraid to 
be baptized publicly you will be afraid to 
act as a Christian should afterwards. Of 
course I would like you to be baptized, and 
also to join the church, but you cannot 
join it in that way." Then he went away, 
and although I see him often, he has never 
come to service since, neither does he 
appear to wish to become a Christian. 

There was a boy in our school who was, 
I think, a Christian. He said several times 
that he wished to be baptized, and once 
even promised to appear before the church 
to give in his experience. The evening 
came and the church assembled, but the 
boy did not come. We waited, but still he 
did not come ; the church remained in 
session till nearly ten o'clock, then very 
reluctantly we gave him up and adjourned. 

Next morning he told us that he got 

ready to come to the service, but his sister 

went into a hysterical tit, tore her hair and 

her clothes, rolled upon the floor, and 

270 



tlbe IReUdion of tbe ipeople 

screamed at the top of her voice till the 
boy weakened and promised not to come. 
Then she immediately got well. 

However, he said after a few months he 
would try again, but the same thing hap- 
pened. The church waited but waited in 
vain ; his sister screamed and tore her hair 
as before, and as before the boy weakened; 
he could not face the storm, and so he too 
passed into the great army of educated 
young men who do not believe in Budd- 
hism ; who never worship the priests ; who 
call the idols bbcks of stone or lumps of 
wood, and will even throw stones at them to 
show how little they care for or fear them ; 
and yet they are negative — they do not 
believe in the religion of their fathers, but 
they will not come out as Christians, and 
so they go through life, neither one thing 
nor the other. 

There are some strange contradictions in 
the religion of the Burman and the Shan, 
at least they appear contradictions to a 
Westerner, although the Burman himself 
does not regard them as such. 

I knew a man in one of the cities of the 

Southern Shan States ; he is dead now ; 

he had several large dogs, fierce and savage 

as wolves. Everybody in the city dreaded 

271 



©DDs anD JEnDs trom iPasoDa 5LanD 

these brutes, for they had badly bitten 
several people. I never passed the gate of 
the compound without carrying a riding 
crop with a long, heavy lash, and even 
with that it was sometimes difficult to keep 
the dogs off. 

One day a man came running into our 
compound, and said that one of these dogs 
had gone mad, and the wife of their owner 
had barricaded herself in the house fright- 
ened half to death, and begged me to come 
and shoot the dog ; her husband was away, 
she said. I snatched up my gun and ran 
out, but although the compound was but a 
stone's throw from ours, before I got there a 
man came running to meet me and brought 
word that his master had just returned, and 
asked me please not to come. Why I 
Because he feared to have the dog shot on 
his compound. Again why ? Because he 
feared some part of the guilt incurred in 
killing the dog might cling to him, and so 
he would rather take the chances of a mad 
dog biting a score of people than have it 
shot in his compound. 

And yet the strangest part of the whole 

thing lay in the fact that this man, possessed 

of such a tender conscience that he would 

not allow even a mad dog to be killed, had 

272 



Zbc IReligion of tbe ipeople 

been — so the people in the city said — the 
head of a band of robbers, and if he had 
not shot men from ambush himself, he had 
supplied the guns, the powder, and the 
shot, and the deed had been done at his 
order. 

A man will not drown half a litter of 
puppies when they are an hour old — that 
would be a sin — but he will allow them to 
starve to death. 

Fish is one of the staple foods of Burma, 
and thousands of people earn the larger 
part of their living by catching fish. 
Should you ask a fisherman how he, a 
Buddhist, can spend his time in killing fish, 
he will smile, shake his head and reply, 
** I do not kill fish ; they come into my 
net and I merely pull them out of the water 
and throw them upon the bank ; they die 
themselves ; I do not kill them ! " 

** Things are not always what they 
seem" in Burma, as in other countries. 
I have heard globe-trotters go into ecstasies 
over the pagodas and shrines. They see 
at Rangoon the mighty Shwe Da Gon Pa- 
goda, covered with gold from base to top ; 
they see the Thousand and One Pagodas at 
Mandalay, and they exclaim, " How pious, 
how good ! They put the average Christian 
S 273 



Ot>t>3 anC) BnDs trom iPagoOa XanD 

to the blush/* etc., etc. But wait; one 
must get to the reason why all these pa- 
godas and shrines and idols were built before 
one can be in a position to judge of things 
properly. Well, why were these pagodas 
built ? To uplift the people ? Not a bit of 
it. They were built to gain merit. Why 
does a man become a monk ? To gain 
merit. Why does he take pilgrimages, 
make offerings, worship idols, shrines, and 
priests ? Why do these solicit alms and 
swell the ranks of the mendicants who are so 
abundant ? To gain merit— not to help any- 
body else. Thus we see the entire system 
is founded upon selfishness. Doing good 
simply and solely for the sake of doing 
good is entirely foreign to Buddhism, that is 
Buddhism as one sees it in the everyday 
life of the people. It is selfishness, selfish- 
ness, selfishness — and if the corner-stone 
of a religion be built upon self what must 
the outcome be ? 



274 



(BIO00ari? 



Abbreviations : A. I. Anglo-Indian ; B. Burmese. 
H. Hindustani; S. Shan. 

Anna. (H.) An Indian coin worth about two cents. 

Baboo. (H.) A clerk. 

Bazaar. (H.) A market. 

Bheestie. (H.) A water-carrier. 

Boy. (A. I.) A body servant. 

Bungalow. (H.) A house. 

Chattie. (H.) A cooking-pot. 

Compound. (A. I.) The enclosure in which a house 
stands. 

Coolie. (H.) A laborer. 

Dah. (B.) {S.lap) A sword with a long handle 
but no guard. 

Dhohie. (H.) A laundry man. 

Durhar. (H.) A gathering called to meet a high 
official. 

Durwan. (H.) A janitor. 

Eurasian. A person of mixed parentage — Europe- 
Asia. 

Gautama. The last incarnation of Buddha ; the god 
worshiped by Buddhists. 

Gharry. (H.) A carriage or cart. 

Godown. (A. I.) A place used for storing goods. 

Hau. (S.) The palace of a prince. 

Heng. (S.) The headman of a village. 

Hpea. (S.) Sttnat. 

Jungle. {H.) A forest ; the country. 
275 



Kachins. (B.) A tribe of fierce mountain people 
living in Upper Burma. 

Kallah. ( B. ) A foreigner. 

Karens. (B.) A mountain tribe of Lower Burma; 
thousands of tiiese people have embraced Chris- 
tianity. 

Lap. (S.) Sttdah. 

Mue^^in. The man who climbs the minaret and 
calls Mohammedans to their prayers. 

Nat. (B.) (S. hpea.) "A kind of god, a being 
superior to man and inferior to Brahmas, some of 
whom inhabit the inferior celestial regions and 
others have dominion over different parts of the 
earth." — Doctor Judson's Burmese- English Dictionary, 

Ngapi. (B.) Putrid fish. 

Nigban. The Burmese heaven. 

Nullah. (H.) A dry watercourse or small valley. 

Paddjf. (A. I.) Unhusked rice. 

Parah. (S.)| "God" or ''lord," the word gen- 

Payah. ( B. ) / erally used for an idol ; sometimes 
used when speaking of a pagoda. 

Tice. A small coin, one-fourth of an anna. 

Punkah. (H.) A large, swinging fan. 

Pwae. (B.) A feast ; a theatrical performance. 

Sahib. (H.) *' Sir," a title of respect. 

Sanbyah. (B.) A round tray used in winnowing 
rice. 

S««i^«.(B)1 A native prince. 

Saupa. (S.) -^ 

sZlk Ts\ ^ " Teacher," a title of respect. 

Sepoy. (H.) A soldier (native). 

Shans. (B.) A tribe of people, second in impor- 
tance to the Burmans, living in the valleys of 
Upper Burma ; they call themselves *' Tai." 
276 



Syce, (H.) A groom. 

"" Rogue ^^ elephant. An elephant which has been 

driven out of the herd because of its bad temper ; 

sometimes a partially tamed elephant which has 

escaped from its owners ; always a dangerous 

animal. 
Rupee. (H.) The standard coin of the Indian 

empire, worth about thirty-three cents. 
Tounthus. A hill tribe living near Mongnai in the 

Southern Shan States. 
Zarat. (B.) A resting-place usually built in a 

monastery compound ; a person gains merit by 

building a ^ayat. The Shan word is ^arap. 



277 



NOV 24 1806 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




005 074 747 5 






